Daniel Hong: Cities become smarter with mobile payment

Daniel Hong, Vice President of Financial Technology (FiT) of Tencent, said that mobile payment is another major project of FiT in addition to wealth management and securities. He recalled that Tencent witnessed the flourishing of the Mainland’s mobile payment market. So far, more than 700 million platform subscribers have used WeChat payment tools.

Hong said that mobile payment has driven the development and transformation of numerous industries, making life easier for many people in the Mainland. At the same time, businesses can use the geographic heat maps composed through mobile payments and WeChat accounts to formulate more precise marketing strategies.

Since its launch in 2017, Tencent’s Ride Code has penetrated into various public transport networks in 90 cities. Hong explained that the popularity of the ride code will likely enable the Government to learn about the public’s commute habits and thus improve its administrative planning.

Hong said that Tencent will attempt to load ID card information into mobile phones through face recognition and actual explicit verification, so in the future, users will no longer need to carry around cash, bank cards and ID cards. Instead, they only need one mobile phone wherever they go.