Uber Takes Its Alipay Partnership Global

Uber, the only global ridesharing company, and Alipay, the world’s largest third-party payment platform operated by Ant Financial Services Group (“Ant Financial”), announced a global partnership to enable Chinese travelers to seamlessly request and pay for Uber rides from either the Uber or Alipay app, in all 400+ cities where Uber operates. Uber and Alipay’s collaboration enables a frictionless in-app integration at a global scale, making international travel even quicker and easier for Alipay’s over 450 million active users, who can now request and pay for rides with the push of a button.

“Ant Financial is dedicated to provide financial services to small and micro businesses and hundreds of millions of individual consumers globally, powered by our world-class technology and big data capability.” Eric Jing, President of Ant Financial said. “Alipay’s collaboration with Uber reflects a step forward of Ant Financial’s global strategy, and the collaboration also extends to the Alipay’s strategic global partners like Paytm in India. The collaboration aims to bring better experiences for our users globally.”

Eric Alexander, Head of Business, Uber Asia Pacific, said, “Chinese travelers know and love how easy it is to request and pay for Uber rides at home; now we’re excited to bring this experience to them wherever they are in the world, right from the Alipay app. Working with Alipay enables us to bring this top-notch experience to the ever-growing number of Chinese travelers who choose to use Uber internationally.”

Here’s how the integration will work – This integration is available internationally, in 68 overseas countries and territories including the US, and 400+ cities across the world.

If you’re traveling outside the Chinese mainland, simply open the Uber app. Once a user logs in or creates a new account,  they can link to their current Alipay account to enjoy a seamless payment solution when requesting rides around the world

Or starting today, click the “Uber” icon on the home screen of the Alipay app to request a ride. Riders can also see their ETA, driver and the vehicle information, and at its completion, no further confirmation is required – a direct RMB payment will be charged to a user’s Alipay account.

Uber riders have been able to use Alipay to pay for their rides in the Chinese Mainland since 2014, and Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau since early 2016; however, until now, Chinese riders using the Uber app internationally needed to connect a dual-currency credit card to their account, and were billed for their rides in U.S. dollars. The partnership with Alipay will enable Uber riders to pay for their international rides directly in RMB using their connected Alipay accounts, eliminating the need for dual currency credit cards or currency conversion.

Since February 2015, Alipay has been sharing its technology with Paytm, India’s largest payments provider, to promote financial solutions to those in India who have limited access. Alipay and Uber also announced a deepening of their collaborative global expansion efforts in India, through a similar strategy and product integration between Alipay, Uber and Paytm.

“We want to bring better payment services to people in India and we are achieving our goals with technologies powered by Alipay,” said Vijay Shekhar Sharma, CEO and Founder of Paytm. “Leveraging the strategic partnership with Ant Financial, we look forward to working closely with more global partners like Uber to grow our influence in order to benefit our 126 million users.”