WeChat and Alipay: Who has a better chance of winning the future of business?

This Monday, Alipay released Zhaocaibao and began to build a financial open platform; on Wednesday, the Alipay Wallet Open Platform was officially launched. The first batch of open API interfaces included seven categories, including service window, QR code, Wi-Fi, cards and coupons, account system, payment, and JSAPI, with a total of more than 60 interfaces, providing four major capabilities: payment, data analysis, membership management, and marketing.

Currently, Ali Small and Micro Financial Services has five businesses, including traditional online payment business, mobile business Alipay Wallet, Ali Small and Micro Loans, Yu'ebao and Zhaocaibao. They can be divided into two categories, one is platform-based and the other is product-based. Traditional online payment business, mobile business Alipay Wallet and Zhaocaibao are platform-based products, while small and micro loans and Yu'ebao are product-based.

The most imaginative products of Ant Financial at present are platform products. Zhaocaibao, which is managed by Yuan Leiming of the Ant Financial Business Unit, is a financial regular financial management platform, while the mobile business Alipay Wallet is managed by Liu Lejun, general manager of the Ant Financial Wireless Business Unit.

In terms of financial services and wealth management, Ant Financial has been deeply engaged in it for many years. In the regular wealth management "Zhaocaibao" and the money fund wealth management "Yu'ebao", it has long left its Internet competitors behind, and the traditional financial industry is even more far behind. Yu'ebao's nearly 600 billion yuan scale has accelerated from 11 billion yuan to the trillion yuan Zhaocaibao, and it is the only one in the world who is temporarily seeking to be defeated.

In addition to Alipay's online money transfer and exchange, water, electricity, gas and other life services, Alipay Wallet has been promoting mobile payments and open platform services in the past two years. In this area, Alipay Wallet has to face only one powerful enemy: WeChat. WeChat Pay competes with Alipay Wallet's Kuaidi Taxi through Didi Taxi, and competes with Alipay Wallet's face-to-face payment and sound wave payment through QR code scanning payment. In terms of open platform services, WeChat has taken a step ahead, launching subscription accounts and service accounts through WeChat public accounts, and opening various interfaces to merchants and individuals.

In order to respond to the offensive of WeChat, after Liu Lejun took charge of Xiaowei's mobile business, Alipay Wallet launched its biggest revision to date. Alipay Wallet version 8.0 added "Wealth" and "Service Window" sections. Wealth integrated Yu'ebao, and in the future it will include Zhaocaibao and Xiaowei's credit reporting agency "Zhima Credit"; the biggest highlight is the addition of "Service Window". From then on, Alipay Wallet has an open platform.

What should a small business do if it wants to do business on the mobile Internet? Small businesses can open a store on Alipay Wallet for free. In just two days, they can build a "mobile store"; and developers can conduct personalized advanced development through the platform API interface.

Speaking of open platforms, WeChat official accounts explored it earlier and opened it to everyone. Subscription accounts mainly featured news information, and service accounts became corporate CRM systems. However, when WeChat was ambitious to develop WeChat stores through official accounts + WeChat payment, it was met with a cold reception. People were not so welcoming of selling things in Moments and official accounts. Zhou Hongyi joked that "even a pole can bloom" on WeChat, but the fact seems to be not so.

Although also an open platform, the Alipay Wallet Service Window takes a different approach.

Without social attributes, the service window can focus more on business without worrying about disturbing users. People who open Alipay wallets want business and financial services. The service window is not open to everyone, but only to merchants with real-name authentication. The Alipay wallet open platform started trial operation at the end of June this year. So far, more than 1,000 merchants and institutions have settled in, including No. 1 Store, Dianping, New Hope, and Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center.

WeChat uses some celebrity public accounts such as China Southern Airlines, Guangzhou Public Security Bureau and the National Museum to guide the development of public accounts. Alipay Wallet explores subdivided industries under its own guidance and with the participation of various parties. These products and business models are jointly explored by third-party developers, service providers and merchants with Alipay.

For example, Alipay Wallet has previously announced O2O plans such as "Future Hospital", "Future Public Transportation", "Future Shopping District", and "National WiFi Plan". In the "Future Hospital", the hospital enters the Alipay Wallet platform and connects the hospital's information system with the API interface provided by Alipay. This allows patients to register at home, queue up smartly, pay via mobile payment, and transmit the examination results to doctors and patients in the cloud.

Alipay Wallet calls the open platform "empowerment", which means transferring Alipay's decade of accumulated business data, cloud computing and payment capabilities to ordinary merchants, allowing these merchants who are "poor and blank" in the mobile Internet field to instantly possess various super powers.

Through these interfaces, Alipay Wallet provides developers with four major capabilities: payment, data analysis, membership management, and marketing. "This year, an important task for Alipay Wallet is to open up, so that more merchants can share the data and capabilities we have accumulated over the years." Liu Lejun believes that as the platform's innovative functions become richer, more interfaces such as biometrics, Bluetooth, and smart hardware will be opened in the future.

WeChat opens up the most traffic and users, while the Alipay wallet open platform emphasizes "payment + data" capabilities. Among the current mainstream mobile open platforms, it has the most open interfaces related to payment and data attributes.

With the help of these interfaces, merchants can not only provide users with a variety of mobile payment methods such as balance, quick payment, Yu'ebao, etc., but also establish an O2O business closed loop through face-to-face payment and NFC technology; and by sharing Alipay's business data, merchants can accurately grasp the user's gender, age, regional occupational distribution, annual consumption capacity, etc., thereby achieving the purpose of operating users with big data.

To put it simply, the first step is to help merchants make more money, all types of money; the second step is to help merchants retain and analyze more users.

There is no exact number of WeChat payment users, but the number of active payment users of Alipay Wallet has exceeded 100 million. These users are "closest to money", and the merchants that have opened service windows at Alipay Wallet are also targeting these future users who are used to online and mobile payment.

On August 28, WeChat Pay also announced that it would take on Alipay Wallet. WeChat Pay officially announced the "WeChat Smart Life" industry-wide solution, which is based on WeChat public accounts + WeChat Pay to help traditional industries "transplant" their original business models to the WeChat platform. WeChat Pay's move is intended to enter almost all traditional fields such as medical care, hotels, retail, department stores, catering, ticketing, express delivery, universities, e-commerce, and people's livelihood.

What are the similarities and differences between WeChat public platform and Alipay wallet service window?

First of all, whether it is WeChat’s so-called “smart life” or Alipay’s “future life”, its essence is to face hundreds of trillions of offline traditional businesses, and there is no difference in essence.

Secondly, they all connect online and offline. WeChat's slogan is "Connect Everything", connecting the offline world with the online world through QR codes. In addition to QR codes, Alipay Wallet also has sound waves and universal WiFi. Connecting the offline traditional world with the online world can generate huge imagination. Of course, connecting online and offline platforms will bring huge benefits.

Moreover, the temperaments of the two companies are also different.

Tencent's foundation lies in social networks and interpersonal relationships. WeChat is strong in interpersonal interaction and social marketing. Merchants who enter the public platform theoretically face 600 million users. As long as they do a good job in group and circle of friends marketing, they can gain a large number of users in a short period of time. Some WeChat subscription accounts and circle of friends games have proved this.

The core of Alipay is payment. Alipay Wallet is first and foremost a payment tool. The 100 million Alipay Wallet users are all users who have Yu'ebao or Zhaocaibao linked to their bank cards. The transaction conversion rate is very high, and they can be directly converted into cash, which shortens the chain. We know that in network conversion, the shorter the chain, the better the effect. With one more link in the chain, the loss of users and income is exponential. So Alipay Wallet users may not be as many as WeChat, but the conversion rate is surprisingly good.

In offline practice, another factor that cannot be ignored is the real-name system. For example, hospital registration must be done with real-name ID, and this difference is immediately apparent when O2O connects with hospitals.

WeChat requires a mobile phone number, QQ number, etc., and except for the public platform, users are not required to authenticate their real names. Alipay Wallet follows Alipay, and all users are authenticated with their ID cards, which is a great advantage when promoting the future hospital. WeChat users without real-name authentication face great trouble when accessing hospital information systems. The test of Guangzhou Children's Hospital, a hospital where the Alipay Wallet service window is stationed, shows that 15% of the registrations every day come from Alipay Wallets, with a peak of 20%.

To be fair, whether it is WeChat or Alipay Wallet, their public platforms are just getting started, and the market has not yet been fully developed. At the time of making the pie bigger, both companies have great opportunities and it is far from the time for a fierce competition.

The Internet origin theory has once again played a role: the WeChat public platform born from Tencent focuses on social networking and marketing, and the temperament of a product manager is readily revealed; the Alipay wallet service window born from Alibaba is more adept at business thinking and big data accumulation, and its ground promotion and offline activities are vigorous and resolute.

Unlike the Internet world where one person’s call has universal repercussions, neither Tencent nor Alibaba Xiaowei has ever controlled the rules of the real offline business world. Whoever has a determined and highly executive team will have the upper hand.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.