A woman walks out of the headquarters of PBOC in Beijing
HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - China's central bank has ordered online payment units of dotcom giants Alibaba and Tencent to stop processing online payments using QR codes, the two companies said on Friday.
Alipay is the online payment unit of Alibaba Small and Micro Financial Services Group, an affiliate of Alibaba Group Ltd.
The online payment unit of Tencent Holdings Ltd is called Caifutong.
Alipay and Caifutong confirmed to Reuters that they had received such notice from the central bank. The central bank did not immediately respond to requests for comment. CITIC did not immediately answer calls seeking comment.
CITIC Bank announced in an exchange filing on Thursday that the bank planned to partner with Alibaba and Tencent to issue virtual credit cards-based QR code payments.
(Reporting by Zhao Hongmei, Xie Heng and Pete Sweeney; Editing by Paul Tait)
Bit-sky comments:
China is a magic country.
Most of the high-profit markets are monopolized by the government via state-owned firms, banking is a typical example. Alibaba and Tencent have challenged this monopoly, "forcing" the government to carry out this banning regulation to protect the banks.
But another magic thing for China is, if something is banned by the government while there is great market demand, then there must be huge market potential for small "ants", because China is so huge, the government "elephant" has no way to control the ants.
That means, this is a very good news for Bitcoin and other domocurrencies to take over the instant online pay market.
