China’s Online Payments Market See Decline in Concentration: PCAC

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The peak body for the Chinese payments sector points to declining levels of market concentration in the online payments industry.

A report from the Payment & Clearing Association of China (PCAC) founds that as of the end of 2021 China’s payments sector included over 4000 banking sector financial institutions, as well as 224 legal person payments organisations with 1569 branches and around 49,400 staff.

The “2022 China Payments Sector Annual Report” (中国支付产业年报2022) released on by PCAC on 15 June also found that these payments organisations had opened 5.7 billion payments accounts for users, including 3.244 billion active accounts.

PCAC’s report highlighted declining levels of concentration in the online payments sector, with the top ten banking sector institutions accounting for 83.75% of all online payments processed by PCAC member banks in 2021, marking a decline of 7.63 percentage points compared to the previous year.

The top ten payments organisations accounted for a 96.25% share of all online payments processed by PCAC payments organisations in 2021, for a slight reduction of 0.48 percentage points.

In 2021 Chinese banks processed 102.278 billion online payments transactions, for a total sum of 235.39 trillion yuan. Payments organisations processed a total of 143.957 billion transactions with a total value of 57.37 trillion yuan, for increases of 50.06% and 5.19% respectively compared to the previous year.