Over 70 percent of Chinese use mobile payments every day in 2020

Seventy-four percent of Chinese people used mobile payments every day in 2020, according to a survey report by the Payment & Clearing Association of China.

The figure was 4.4 percentage points higher from that in 2019, according to the report.

The convenience of mobile payment was a major reason for the users to use it, the report said.

"The increasing popularity of mobile payment fully indicated China's progress in the infrastructure construction of the mobile payment sector," said Sun Zhanping, vice president of China UnionPay Merchant Services Co., Ltd.

The increasing amount of micropayments proves that mobile payment is playing a more and more important role in facilitating the users and promoting consumption, said Dong Ximiao, chief researcher of the Merchants Union Consumer Finance Company.

A major function of mobile payment was to offer convenience for users, he told People's Daily, adding that the rising proportion of payments under 100 yuan showed that the service had seeped into life scenarios such as bus and metro stations, as well as shopping malls. Mobile payment was employed at an increasingly higher frequency in daily consumption, he continued.

The report found that QR code scanning was the most common way for users to pay, while QuickPass, a unified app for China's banking industry was used less on terminals.

Safety risk was the top concern of mobile payment users. According to the report, the main security problems in mobile payment were personal information leakage and fake payment codes.

"We should further improve our anti-risk capabilities amid rapid progress of the industry, to bring not only convenience, but also assurance to the users," Dong said.

As China enacts a series of laws on data security and personal information protection, relevant parties must enhance risk control in information leakage and illegal use of personal information to effectively safeguard the interests and rights of consumers.

Sun believes that the in-depth application of new technologies such as big data and AI in the payment industry is driving the development of the systems, technologies and models of risk control, and the mobile payment industry shall extend more assuring and convenient services to both merchants and consumers.