Internationalization of Alipay

About the project

Before covid, an approximate number of 30 million foreigners entered China every year, to travel, do business or study. International payment issuers, like Visa and Mastercard is not widely supported as China jumped over to mobile payment directly with mega player Alipay and Wechat Pay.

These enormous group of users need to make payment in China in every way. Alipay aims to provide seamless service for these foreign users to quickly adopt Alipay while not forcing themselves to change any transaction habits.

Challenge

It was not only a war with competitor, but also a challenge within its organization:

• Alipay has over 1 billion Annual Active Users while target user number for international service is somewhere over 30 million
• Alipay makes a majority of its revenue from domestic users and business
• Alipay's as-is for international users are really poor

To avoid the back and forth with domestic team on changing their system and flow, the business team came across a brilliant idea of creating a dedicated app called TourPass.

Strategy and approach

The end to end user flow goes through Alipay first and then to TourPass. Given all the restriction mentioned above, I decided to:

• Solve internal issues first (release independent from Alipay app release)
• In the meantime, start conversation with domestic team on making core flow changes (engaging high level roles)

Design principles

Centered around repairing the trust with users, I practiced a globalization and end-to-end design principles to optimize the service. Starting with current data dashboard, I dived deep with customer service team on all the accurate user feedback and then move to understand the financial context of these users in an international scenario.

A detailed list of principles were then abstracted: Customized, Educated, Trustworthy, Frictionless, Simple, Brand consistency.

Impact

The overall result turned out to be satisfying after first release, with top up success rate in TourPass rose by 21% and complaint rate dropped by 48% (by month). We created a roadmap together, with which I also created some guidelines and library for future team use.