Alipay’s mobile payment business dwarfed PayPal’s in 2013

Over the past weekend, Alipay announced that it processed about US$150 billion in mobile payments in 2013 which is potentially more than PayPal and Square combined. PayPal cleared US$27 billion in 2013 and Square’s number is not public, but likely far less than even PayPal’s. 

That’s a huge number and makes Alipay the largest mobile payments platform in the world. It wasn’t really a question of if it would happen, but when. With over 300 million users and 100 million mobile users, Alipay’s mobile payment growth has tremendous market scale which is part of the reason for the success of their Yu’ebao investment product that just seems to keep growing and growing…