JAKARTA/HONG KONG (Reuters) - For Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, Southeast Asian domestic helpers in Hong Kong may prove key to their global ambitions in financial services.
Both companies recently launched money-transfer services that allow Hong Kong-based workers from Indonesia and the Philippines to send money home cheaply and easily. The moves are a first step in going after a global remittance business that moves more than $600 billion around the world annually.
But the initiatives are also part of the firms’ broader efforts to take their wildly successful WeChat Pay and Alipay mobile payment system overseas.
Southeast Asia, with a growing population of 600 million people who mostly lack bank accounts, is a strategic battleground for Asian tech behemoths and their U.S rivals.
Alibaba’s financial affiliate Ant Financial called its Hong Kong remittance initiative “a starting point and significant step in accelerating our pace to promote financial inclusion globally.”
Tencent’s WeChat Pay, which is ubiquitous in China but has struggled to gain traction abroad outside of Chinese tourist destinations, is more circumspect about the goals for its Hong Kong We Remit service, although a spokesman allowed it was open to “all possibilities.”
Sending money across borders, however, is harder than it looks. That helps explain why both companies are working with a Hong Kong-based financial technology start-up, EMQ, which has regulatory approvals and bank partnerships in place across Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
“We are the pipes and distribution for Tencent,” said EMQ CEO Max Liu. He declined to comment on any relationship with Ant Financial, but three sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters
