--FILE--un asiatico mappa è contrassegnato con segni di Cina UnionPay durante una esposizione finanziaria a Pechino in Cina, 4 settembre 2009. Nel caldo nuovo campo
--FILE--An Asian map is marked with signs of China UnionPay during a financial exhibition in Beijing, China, 4 September 2009. In the hot new field of mobile payments, China is years ahead of the rest of the world. But that alone hasn't made it a lucrative business. In China today, it is commonplace to pay for food delivery, taxis, restaurant meals, movie tickets and much more with a mobile phone. For would-be disrupters in the U.S. and elsewhere, this provides a road map of sorts for how the industry is likely to evolve, as well as where potential potholes lie. Traditional noncash payment methods such as credit cards, and even personal checks, were never widely adopted in China. This has allowed China to leapfrog traditional payment systems. In the U.S., mobile-payment providers such as Apple Pay and PayPal-owned Venmo rely on the traditional infrastructure of bank-card numbers. Not so the leading e-payment solutions in China, Alibaba-affiliated Alipay and Tencent¯s Tenpayªthough user accounts do need to be linked to a traditional bank account. China UnionPay, the state-owned monopoly bank-card issuer, has kept merchant fees low to promote card adoption. It charges around 1% of a transaction¯s value, compared with over 2% for the likes of Visa and MasterCard, according to Bernstein analyst Wei Hou. This fee must be shared with the card-issuing bank and the provider of the point-of-sale terminal. UnionPay¯s take-home share is only around 0.1%.
