The Rise of Enterprise Payments: How B2B Payments Are Becoming the New Growth Engine for Third-Party Payments

1. Enterprise Payment Market Data: Outpacing Personal Payments

For years, China’s third-party payment industry was defined by the explosive growth of consumer-facing mobile payments. But that era is ending. As personal payment penetration approaches saturation, a new growth story is emerging — and it’s happening in the enterprise space.

By the end of 2025, China’s third-party comprehensive payment transaction volume reached 576 trillion yuan, up 2.8% year-on-year. While personal payments still dominate in absolute terms at 366 trillion yuan (up 2.6% YoY), enterprise payments reached 210 trillion yuan with a 3.1% year-on-year growth rate — surpassing personal payment growth for the first time.

The story is even more striking when looking at projections. According to industry estimates, China’s third-party enterprise payment transaction scale is expected to reach 323.5 trillion yuan in 2025 and 409.9 trillion yuan in 2026, with growth rates of 23.0% and 26.7% respectively. The share of industrial internet payments within enterprise payments is projected to rise from 69.2% to 74.1% over the same period.

As one industry analyst put it: “C-end personal payment traffic has gradually peaked, and the market competition structure has stabilized. We are now focusing on the enterprise payment sector, further tracking its development dynamics and business potential”.

2. Growth Drivers: Digital Transformation and Cross-Border Expansion

What’s driving this shift? Two powerful forces are converging.

Force 1: Deepening Enterprise Digital Transformation

Chinese enterprises across all sectors are digitizing their operations at an accelerating pace. Payment is no longer a standalone function — it’s becoming embedded into core business processes such as procurement, logistics, HR, and finance. This integration creates demand for payment solutions that go far beyond simple transaction processing.

As the industry has observed, payment institutions are “continuously accelerating the integration of capital flow and information flow, transforming into comprehensive digital service providers for industrial digitization”. The competitive logic has shifted from “scale expansion” to “high-quality development with equal emphasis on technological innovation and compliance”.

Force 2: Expanding Cross-Border E-Commerce and Global Trade

China’s cross-border e-commerce and global trade continue to expand, driving demand for enterprise-level payment solutions that can handle complex multi-currency, multi-jurisdiction transactions. As one report noted, “payments for Chinese enterprises going global have entered a phase of deep globalization” — businesses care not just about whether payments can be completed, but about efficient fund management, smart risk control, rich global resources, and better customer experience.

The result? A fundamental restructuring of the industry’s growth model. The traditional reliance on “channel fees” is giving way to a new paradigm centered on high-value-added services and technological innovation.

For international businesses, this means the Chinese partners you work with are increasingly sophisticated in their use of digital payment tools — and they expect the same from their global counterparts.

3. Major Players’ Enterprise Payment Strategies

The enterprise payment space is attracting a diverse set of players, each with distinct strategies and competitive advantages.

Zhongyi Jinke: The Enterprise Wallet Solution

China Mobile’s fintech subsidiary, Zhongyi Jinke, has built a comprehensive “Enterprise Wallet” platform that addresses the full spectrum of corporate spending management. The platform covers high-frequency expenditure scenarios including group meals, business travel, transportation, and employee benefits — addressing four core enterprise needs: compliance, cost control, efficiency, and user experience.

The platform establishes a three-tier account system (enterprise-scenario-employee), enabling category-based spending controls, dynamic quota management, budget setting, and intelligent online payment settlement. It also features AI-powered intelligent monitoring that collects and analyzes spending data in real time, generating expenditure reports that strengthen compliance management.

For employees, the experience is seamless: single sign-on for approvals, reservations, and expense reporting — all in one end-to-end workflow. The platform has also introduced innovations like a digital human travel assistant and VR hotel viewing, significantly enhancing user experience.

Bestpay: Deepening the SOE Market

Bestpay, the payment brand of China Telecom, has carved out a distinctive position by focusing on the state-owned enterprise (SOE) market. The company’s strategy centers on two core technology pillars: “payment technology + data technology”.

Key products include:

• “Yufeng” intelligent penetrating supervision platform — enabling real-time, data-driven compliance monitoring
• “Chenji” next-generation financial digital intelligence system — modernizing corporate treasury and financial management
• “Xingyuan” next-generation financial cloud technology infrastructure — providing the underlying technology stack

These solutions address the critical pain points of SOEs in their digital transformation: risk prevention, resource connectivity, capital management, and operational efficiency. To date, Bestpay has established in-depth cooperation with over 150 SOEs. The penetrating supervision platform has already served more than 30 central SOEs with over 50 implemented projects, significantly improving risk prevention accuracy and proactivity in areas such as illegal affiliations, false trade, and shell company identification.

As the company’s leadership has stated, Bestpay is positioned as a “core force in state-owned enterprise data technology,” continuing to deepen the penetrating supervision field in 2026 by further integrating AI with regulatory processes.

LianLian Digital: AI-Native Global B2B Expansion

LianLian Digital has emerged as a leader in AI-powered cross-border enterprise payments. In the first half of 2026, the company’s global payment business TPV reached RMB 249.9 billion, up 25.9% year-on-year, with global payment revenue of RMB 601 million, up 27.1%, and a gross margin of 70.8%.

The company has been systematically expanding beyond its traditional cross-border e-commerce base into B2B trade and service trade sectors including travel, logistics, advertising, and education payment collection. With 68 global payment licenses and qualifications covering over 200 countries and regions and supporting more than 140 currencies, LianLian Digital has built a formidable global payments infrastructure.

On the technology front, LianLian Digital is pursuing an “AI Native + Globalization” strategy. The company’s AI agent, LoopX Pay, completed the first real B2B agent transaction in Greater China in partnership with Visa — an agent that identified procurement needs, recommended suppliers, compared options, placed orders, and executed payment. The company is also working with UnionPay International to explore agent payment scenarios in global procurement.

4. The Internationalization of B2B Payments

The enterprise payment opportunity is not limited to China’s domestic market. B2B cross-border payments represent a massive and rapidly growing opportunity.

Market consensus holds that the B2B payment market is approximately 10 times larger than the B2C cross-border payment market. And growth is accelerating.

Payoneer’s B2B Surge

Payoneer, a global fintech platform focused on cross-border commerce, reported B2B transaction volume of $4.3 billion in Q2 2026, up 48% year-on-year. The growth was driven by strong performance across all major regions, with China and the EMEA region performing particularly well. The company’s revenue excluding interest grew 10% year-on-year, with total transaction volume reaching $23.7 billion, up 15%.

Payoneer’s CEO John Caplan attributed the performance to the company’s “highly differentiated core advantages” built over decades — including infrastructure specifically designed for cross-border commerce, network resources strengthened by scale, and deep trust relationships with millions of businesses worldwide.

B2B BNPL on the Rise

Beyond traditional B2B payments, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) solutions for B2B are also gaining traction. In China, B2B BNPL payments are expected to reach $33.97 billion in 2025, with a projected CAGR of 15.5% from 2026 to 2030. This reflects a broader trend of consumer-style payment innovations moving into the enterprise space.

As the industry evolves, “the competition in international payment expansion has upgraded from ‘who has the lower rates’ to ‘who has the broader network'”. Chinese payment institutions are following Chinese enterprises into Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America — tackling the most complex cross-border fund challenges while building global payment networks.

5. Enterprise Payments and Credit Assessment: What Payment Data Reveals

For international businesses conducting due diligence on Chinese partners, enterprise payment data is emerging as a powerful and underutilized source of insight into a company’s financial health and operational integrity.

The People’s Bank of China has recognized this value. The central bank has established the National Small and Medium Enterprise Fund Flow Credit Information Sharing Platform — a financial infrastructure that enables cross-institutional sharing of enterprise fund flow credit information. The platform leverages payment and settlement data to dynamically reflect SMEs’ business conditions, income and expenditure, debt service capacity, and compliance behavior.

The platform integrates 36 months of account fund data, public institution payment records, and third-party payment transaction history. This includes bank settlement account data (both basic and general accounts) and third-party payment account income and expenditure statistics.

For international businesses, this has clear implications. A Chinese partner’s payment patterns can reveal:

• Real operational activity — consistent payment volumes indicate genuine business operations
• Financial stability — regular, predictable payment flows suggest healthy cash flow
• Supply chain relationships — who they pay and who pays them reveals ecosystem position
• Compliance posture — payment irregularities can signal regulatory or operational risks

While direct access to China’s fund flow platform is not available to foreign entities, authorized service providers can help international businesses access and interpret the official corporate credit reports that incorporate these data elements. Official Enterprise Credit Reports from China’s National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System provide authoritative, government-verified data that includes the full spectrum of corporate registration, shareholder structures, and operational histories.

6. What This Means for International Businesses

The rise of enterprise payments in China is not just an industry trend — it’s a fundamental shift in how Chinese businesses operate. For international enterprises engaged in B2B trade, manufacturing, logistics, or investment with China, here are five practical takeaways.

• Your Chinese partners are digitizing their payments. Whether they’re using Zhongyi Jinke’s Enterprise Wallet for employee expenses, Bestpay’s platform for SOE compliance, or LianLian Digital’s global payment network for cross-border transactions, your partners are increasingly using digital payment infrastructure as core operational tools. Understanding which platforms they use can inform your assessment of their operational maturity.
• B2B payment efficiency affects your commercial terms. The payment platforms your Chinese partners use determine transaction speed, cost, and reliability. This can affect everything from payment terms in contracts to currency risk management. When negotiating, ask about their payment infrastructure.
• Payment data is a proxy for business health. A company’s payment patterns — frequency, volume, consistency, and counterparties — can provide real-time insights into its financial health that traditional financial statements may not capture. Incorporate payment ecosystem analysis into your due diligence process.
• Cross-border B2B payment is a growth opportunity. The 48% year-on-year growth in Payoneer’s B2B business and the 27.1% growth in LianLian Digital’s global payment revenue signal strong demand for cross-border B2B payment solutions. If your business involves cross-border trade with China, these platforms are worth evaluating as partners or benchmarks. Professional Enterprise Credit Reports can help you assess the regulatory standing and operational capabilities of potential payment partners.
• Prepare for deeper integration. As AI agents begin to execute B2B payments autonomously — as demonstrated by LianLian Digital’s LoopX Pay — the entire procurement-to-payment cycle will be compressed. International businesses that understand and embrace this trend will have a competitive advantage.

The enterprise payment revolution in China is not a distant future — it’s happening now. With 210 trillion yuan in annual transaction volume and growth rates exceeding personal payments, this is the new frontier of China’s digital economy.