Chinese mobile payment service Alipay is now available in two large Russian shopping malls in the wake of a rapid increase in Chinese tourists.

According to Russian newspaper Vedomosti, Moscow Central Shopping Mall, Tsum, and St. Petersburg Leningrad Shopping Mall, DLT, have already provided QR codes at cashier desks, and consumers are able to pay by scanning through the Alipay smartphone app.

Statistics from Mercury Group, which runs both malls, show that in the past half-year, Tsum and DLT saw three times the number of foreign customers, 90 percent of them from China.

"As we know, Alipay is quite a popular payment service in China. Therefore, we decided to cooperate with them and started this new payment service for our Chinese customers," says Pavlov Alexandra, chief executive officer of Tsum.

The director of Alipay in Russia and other parts of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Bogdan Zadorozhny, says more than 1.5 million Chinese tourists visited Russia in 2016, each spending an average $4,000.

Zadorozhny says the payment service in the malls is only available for Chinese citizens in Russia, because Alipay has cross-border business cooperation links with Russian banks.

"In the future, we will apply for the formal registration to the Russian financial authority so that the payment option will be open to Russian buyers," Zadorozhny says.

Zadorozhny does not reveal much about the plan, but says Russian VTB Bank may be interested in joining.

Pavlov says cooperation with Alipay will make the shopping malls more attractive to Chinese tourists.

The two malls have accepted UnionPay since 2015 to meet the needs of an increasing number of Chinese customers.

And they are not the first Russian companies to have introduced new policies to attract Chinese tourists. Aeroflot, the largest airline in Russia, also started accepting Alipay payments on its website this month.

Igor Temelkin, a partner at Doloitte Consulting, says Russian businesses are increasingly catering to the interests of Chinese buyers.

He says it is becoming more common to see Chinese advertisements in Moscow and more Chinese-speaking Russians working as guides in Russia. It is therefore logical that the Chinese payment service should be adopted by more Russian stores, he adds.

"Chinese are the most active luxury consumers in the world, and the devaluation of the Russian rouble seemed like good news for them. There has been a 50 percent devaluation of the rouble against the renminbi since 2014, so luxury goods are much cheaper here to Chinese tourists compared to other European countries," he says.

Now the Chinese payment service is in negotiation with more Russian shopping malls to spread Alipay throughout Russia within months.

"We are also talking with Moscow public transportation authorities, and maybe in the near future tourists will be able to use mobile payment to buy bus or metro tickets," Zadorozhny says.

Meanwhile, Alipay has been available in two German-speaking countries - Austria and Switzerland - since June after entering the German market last year.

Concardis, a German payment service and Alipay's partner in these countries, helped Alipay become available in the 20 stores belonging to Goessl, a traditional clothing brand in Austria.

Furthermore, the mobile payment service from China will be officially launched in Switzerland in October, according to Liu Yiu, the director of Alipay for Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

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(China Daily European Weekly 07/21/2017 page24)