Apple's CEO Tim Cook and Alibaba founder Jack Ma talk of teaming up for mobile payment solutions with Apple Pay and Alipay Wallet.
Apple is going all out with its latest mobile payment system, Apple Pay. The Cupertino-based tech giant is planning more investments in China to further its growth. During the WSJD Live Conference in Laguna Beach, California, Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Alibaba founder Jack Ma shared common partnership interests for their mobile payment systems, Apple Pay and AliPay Wallet.
The collaboration talks between the two mobile payment systems come a week after Cook's visit to China, where he discussed plans to open 25 stores in Greater China by 2016. A partnership with Alipay will help Apple in many ways, as Ma pointed out during the conference. Alibaba's mobile payment platform stands third in the global ranking after Visa and MasterCard.
"I'm very interested in that. As always, a good marriage needs both sides hard working," Ma said, according to Bloomberg. "I respect Apple and respect Tim very, very much."
To this, Cook, who was later called up on stage by WSJ's managing editor Gerry Baker, said he was open to a potential union with Alibaba's Alipay Wallet. "We're going to talk about getting married later this week," said Cook. "I love what he's done, I think he's a brilliant guy. I think he has brilliant people at the company so if we can find some areas of common space, I love it. I love partnering with people like that."
Apple's payment solution for card-less transactions has done well since its launch. According to the company, more than 1 million credit and debit card activations were recorded in the first 72 hours of availability, which is quite impressive, as Google and PayPal already have a head start in the market.
Alipay Wallet, which was launched in January 2013, has reached nearly 100 million people using the service to process one-third of Alibaba's daily payments with mobile phones. The system has a strong, active user base of 190 million and processes 45 million transactions each day.
Apple hasn't shared any info on the number of users signed up for Apple Pay.
