Chinese payments app Alipay has tied up with six mobile wallets in Europe to offer a unified Quick Response (QR) code for mobile payments, the South China Morning Post reported. The tie-up will allow users of all six wallets to pay for purchases in 10 European countries, and will bring together more than 5 million users and over 190,000 merchants, according to a joint statement by the companies. The six mobile wallets that have tied up with Alipay are Austria’s Bluecode, Finland’s ePassi and Pivo, Norway’s Vipps, Spain’s Momo, and Portugal’s Pagaqui. The SCMP report said that they were working with the Chinese payments provider to roll out a standardised QR code format, provided by Alipay, so that users of any wallet would be able to make payments at merchants that already accept payments from the other wallets. Alipay users will also be able to pay at merchants' who adopt the QR code format. In India, the government is looking into making it mandatory for all shops to offer Unified Payments Interface (UPI) payments through QR codes, but this could give the NPCI a virtual monopoly (see below). Alipay seeking legal entry into Nepal after ban Last week, we reported that Alipay was looking to launch in Nepal in the next few weeks, just 10 days after Nepal banned it along with its rival WeChat Pay for operating in the country without permission. The ban followed an investigation by the Himalayan Times which found that Alipay and WeChat Pay were…
