Bank of China Achieves QR Code Compatibility with WeChat Pay

Two of China’s big state-owned banks are cooperating with payment giants China UnionPay and WeChat Pay to achieve compatibility when it comes to QR code systems.

Bank of China has reportedly engaged in cooperation with China UnionPay and WeChat Pay on trials to achieve “face-to-face” compatibility of QR codes for payments purposes.

Under the trials users of the Bank of China mobile app will be able to scan WeChat Pay QR codes for payments purposes.

Bank of China is not the only big state-owned lender to take part in QR-code compatibility trials with China UnionPay and WeChat Pay.

Bank of Communications announced on 13 Jan­u­ary that it had taken the lead in achiev­ing the in­te­gra­tion of pay­ments func­tions via mo­bile phone scans of WeChat QR codes.

The ini­tial tri­als for the QR code in­te­gra­tion have been launched in cities in­clud­ing Fuzhou, Ningbo and Ji­nan, with other cities to follow soon. 

The “Fin­tech De­vel­op­ment Plan (2019 – 2021)” (金融科技（Fin­Tech）发展规划（2019-2021）年) re­leased by the Chi­nese cen­tral bank in Sep­tem­ber 2019 high­lighted the com­pat­i­bil­ity of QR code pay­ments as a key goal. 

The Plan called for “dri­ving QR code pay­ment com­pat­i­bil­ity, re­search­ing and for­mu­lat­ing com­pat­i­ble bar­code pay­ment tech­nol­ogy stan­dards, uni­fi­ca­tion of bar­code pay­ment cod­ing reg­u­la­tions, es­tab­lish­ment of a bar­code pay­ment tech­nol­ogy sys­tem, over­com­ing the bar­ri­ers be­tween bar­code pay­ment ser­vices, and achieve mu­tual recog­ni­tion and scan­ning of the codes of dif­fer­ent apps and ven­dors.”

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