AN APP THAT ISN’T ALL TALK
WeChat is more than just a mobile messaging app; the enormously popular platform’s tentacles reach into countless realms, from e-payments and online storefronts to taxis, news and banking. The app parallels countless companies, services and features — juggernauts in their own right — bulleted below. WeChat as PayPal PayPal, North America’s dominant online payment processing service, has nothing on the Tencent-owned WeChat in China. Tenpay, the payment processor used in all WeChat transactions from food deliveries to hotel bookings, had a 14-per-cent share of the mobile payment market in the first quarter of 2015. While Aliplay, run by e-commerce giant Alibaba, still holds more than three-quarters of the market, Tenpay can draw on WeChat’s 650 million active users, many of whom submit their banking information voluntarily to pay retailers via their smartphones — giving a cut to the broker, of course. WeChat as Twitter While micro-blogging giant Weibo may have more in common with Twitter than WeChat, the latter’s private messaging and public page features draw on traits inherent to tweeting. The highly used Moments function allows users to view a stream of their contacts’ activity and post updates of their own, much like Twitter and Facebook. Sitting alongside the app’s basic messaging features, Moments allows users to post photos and status updates, and publicly like and comment on them. Sound familiar? WeChat as Uber WeChatters on the go can grab rides with a minicab service called Didi Dache — already China’s leading taxi app when the company behind it was given a $115-million cash injection by Tencent in 2013. Tens of millions of taxi rides have been logged through WeChat since 2014. In October, Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, slammed WeChat for blocking his ride-sharing service’s official account on the ubiquitous mobile messaging app and effectively censoring Uber-related news articles ordinarily viewable through WeChat. China makes up about 30 per cent of all Uber rides across the globe, Kalanick has said. WeChat as Shopify Shopify — the humble, Ottawabased e-commerce software platform that gives basement entrepreneurs everywhere an easy means to sell knitted mittens and artisanal hot sauce — has a mirror across the Pacific. WeChat allows users to custom-build a shop into their profiles or set up third-party services through the Tencent-backed Weidian (or YouShop). Online vendors can post product photos and information, accept payments and ship off wares, similar to Shopify’s new mobile app Sello. WeChat as Google Hangouts With instant messaging, WeChat has easily outplayed Hangouts, the most popular feature to emerge from Google+. Sometimes criticized as clunky or confusing, the mix of messaging, calls and videoconferencing that Hangouts offers hasn’t caught on well, especially compared with WeChat’s 650 million active users. WeChat is even catching up to Whatsapp, which has 700 million active users following Facebook’s $22-billion buyout last year. Facebook Messenger, the social media megalith’s other IM option, boasts about 600 million users. WeChat as Apple Pay Apple is poised to become the first major foreign company to offer domestic e-payment services in China, with the goal of launching Apple Pay there by early February. If it can pull it off, Apple will beat Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to the pecuniary punch — and encroach on WeChat’s growing share of the lucrative e-payment market.
WeChat has also begun to offer loans up to $30,000 that can be approved in minutes. No traditional credit check required. Tencent’s bid to capture a larger slice of China’s rapidly rising Internet finance pie — worth more than $1 trillion — draws on bank account information and data from a user’s social network to gauge whether they merit credit.