Representatives suggest: Substantially reduce WeChat payment fees

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Regardless of the field, handling fees are a normal charge item. However, if a company in a near-monopoly field charges high handling fees by relying on its own market advantages, it is worth discussing.

Zhu Lieyu, deputy to the National People's Congress and director of Guangdong Guoding Law Firm, pointed out that WeChat Pay has already occupied nearly 40% of the market share in the field of third-party mobile payments and has a clear market advantage. With this advantage, it charges merchants in most industries a handling fee of 0.6% and charges users a withdrawal fee of 0.1%.

Zhu Lieyu believes that this violates the principles of integrity and fairness, does not conform to the market operation rules of fair competition, and harms the legitimate interests of the majority of operators and users of WeChat payment services.

Therefore, he suggested regulating the unreasonable charging behavior of WeChat Pay and significantly reducing the WeChat Pay transaction fees.

According to Analysys International data, in the third quarter of 2020, the transaction volume of my country's third-party mobile payment market reached 67.27 trillion yuan, a month-on-month increase of 11.56%. Alipay and WeChat Pay led with absolute advantages.

However, Representative Zhu Lieyu did not mention Alipay in his proposal. Perhaps it is because WeChat, as a national app, has a larger number of users?

Data from third-party agency QuestMobile shows that WeChat’s monthly active users have exceeded 950 million, while Alipay’s has exceeded 730 million.