Intelligent Cross-Border Payments: How Chinese Payment Institutions Are Going Global and Reshaping the Competitive Landscape

1. Market Overview: Booming but Entering a New Phase

Cross-border payment has become the brightest spot in China’s third-party payment industry. In the first half of 2025, licensed payment institutions processed RMB 4.7 trillion in cross-border RMB settlements, a staggering 34.6% year-on-year increase. To put this in perspective, the broader RMB cross-border receipt and payment volume reached RMB 35 trillion in the same period, up 14% year-on-year, with goods trade accounting for RMB 6.4 trillion — the highest level on record.

But the rapid growth masks a deeper shift. As one industry insider put it, the cross-border payment sector is “booming but entering a clear phase of stock-market competition.” Traditional channel fees continue to decline, and the low-price competition dividend has largely peaked. The era of competing solely on price is over.

The competitive dynamics in cross-border payment are markedly different from the domestic market. According to a Guotai Haitong Securities industry report, cross-border business profitability and competitive landscape are “significantly superior to the domestic market” — average fee rates are higher, and the barriers to entry — licenses, clearing infrastructure, and compliance — are much steeper, keeping the market relatively less crowded. Leading players that have established overseas presence are seeing rapid transaction volume growth, with license matrices and ecosystem partnerships with international e-commerce and card networks becoming key competitive moats.

2. Policy Drivers: Building a Multi-Channel, Broad-Coverage Cross-Border Payment System

The rapid expansion of cross-border payment is not happening in a policy vacuum. At the 2026 Lujiazui Forum, People’s Bank of China Governor Pan Gongsheng delivered a keynote address titled “The Transformation of China’s Financial Structure and the Modernization of Financial Markets,” in which he explicitly called for building and improving a multi-channel, broad-coverage cross-border payment system.

This is not just rhetoric. The PBOC’s 2026 Payment and Settlement Work Conference required that payment settlement work in 2026 “closely revolve around the 15th Five-Year Plan and the goal of building a financial powerhouse, promoting high-quality development of the modern payment system,” with a specific focus on accelerating the construction of the RMB cross-border payment system, promoting cross-border payment interconnectivity, and advancing the diversified, multi-tiered development of the cross-border payment system.

The policy framework is being operationalized through concrete measures. In August 2026, the PBOC and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange jointly issued a notice promoting nationwide the centralized cross-border fund operations for multinational corporations, significantly easing the compliance burden for global enterprises operating in China. The PBOC’s “15th Five-Year Reform and Development Plan” further emphasizes deepening two-way opening of financial markets, strengthening cross-border connectivity of financial infrastructure, and improving the multi-tiered, broad-coverage RMB cross-border payment system.

Meanwhile, the Digital RMB International Operations Center in Shanghai has been fully operational, and the CBETS cross-border settlement platform has officially launched, providing new infrastructure for digital currency-based cross-border transactions.

As Bo Tong Consulting Chief Analyst Wang Pengbo noted, the national push for a multi-channel, broad-coverage cross-border payment system is essentially about “improving cross-border clearing infrastructure, broadening the boundaries of cross-border payment application scenarios, and unblocking the circulation bottlenecks between onshore and offshore RMB.” This releases incremental policy and business space for the entire industry.

3. The Intelligence Wave: From Price Wars to AI Competition

If cross-border payment is the battleground, AI is the weapon. When price competition reached its limits, the industry turned to technology — and specifically, to AI agents.

As a Payoneer executive told Beijing Business Today, “The price war dividend from simply lowering traditional channel fees has largely peaked. The industry has entered an era centered on ‘high-value-added services’ and ‘technological innovation’.” The reasons are twofold: first, the basic capabilities of cross-border payment have become widely available, making it difficult to differentiate on payment channels alone; second, Chinese enterprises going global have entered a phase of deep globalization — they care not just about “whether payments can be completed,” but about how to achieve more efficient fund management, smarter risk control, richer global resources, and better customer experience.

The shift is already producing results. XTransfer, a B2B cross-border trade payment platform, has embedded 72 AI agents into its TradePilot review process, covering the entire lifecycle from customer KYC onboarding to transaction authenticity verification and ongoing AML monitoring. The platform’s automated transaction review rate has reached 98.5%, with a fraud rate as low as ~0.003% — and unit risk control costs less than 5% of traditional banks.

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Xunhui Sunrate and Mastercard jointly released the industry’s first white paper on AI agents in B2B cross-border payment, titled Beyond Automation. The white paper argues that cross-border payment is transitioning from the “digitalization and datafication” stage to the third phase — autonomous — where AI agents with reasoning and planning capabilities autonomously orchestrate and optimize end-to-end payment and treasury operations. The white paper identified 16 key application scenarios and 13 implementation use cases, covering supplier management, dynamic payment routing, automated reconciliation, and AML screening.

According to Research Intelo, the global agentic payment market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24% from 2026 to 2034. The value realization pathways for payment companies are threefold: first, AI products create service experience differentiation that drives market share gains; second, AI-powered operating tools embedded in merchant operations convert into subscription-based SaaS revenue with margins significantly higher than core payment businesses; and third, the agent economy generates machine-to-machine micro-payment demand, opening up entirely new business models.

4. Major Players’ Strategies Compared

The AI race in cross-border payment features a diverse set of players — Chinese fintech giants, global card networks, and specialized cross-border platforms — each pursuing distinct strategies.

Ant International: Building the Global AI Payment Ecosystem

Ant International is perhaps the most aggressive in its AI push. In June 2026, it launched a Mobile Agent Protocol for global e-wallets, super-apps, and digital banks, designed to solve the payment experience and security challenges when consumers shop through AI agents. The company raised $8 billion in funding to expand global business, increase AI investment, and scale cross-border payment and global account services.

Ant’s three-pronged global strategy is clear: Alipay+ serves as the core entry point connecting over 50 local e-wallets; Antom handles merchant acquiring with support for 300+ payment methods; and WorldFirst provides global account services. In the first half of 2026, Antom-processed transaction volume for Chinese digital entertainment merchants grew 80% year-on-year.

LianLian Digital: AI-Native Growth Engine

LianLian Digital reported strong H1 2026 results under its “AI-native + globalization” strategy. Global payment TPV reached RMB 249.9 billion, up 25.9% year-on-year, with global payment revenue of RMB 601 million, up 27.1%. The company’s global payment gross margin reached an impressive 70.8%, reflecting the higher profitability of cross-border versus domestic payment services. LianLian has also expanded its global payment licenses and compliance certifications to 68.

PingPong: AI-Powered Efficiency Gains

PingPong has been systematically applying AI across its platform for years, covering marketing, product design, risk control, customer service, and operations. The company’s intelligent global fund routing center — recognized as a provincial-level key enterprise research institute in February 2026 — uses AI to optimize payment routing in real time. With 82 global payment licenses and compliance qualifications, PingPong’s AI-powered risk control system helped clients achieve a 5.3% improvement in payment success rates and a 25% reduction in total transaction costs.

As PingPong executives put it: “In the AI era, the core competitiveness of cross-border payment is absolutely not about ‘competing on fees’ — it’s about whether you can help globalizing enterprises enhance their globalization capabilities and accelerate scaled growth.”

YeahPay (移卡): Explosive Overseas Growth

YeahPay, the overseas payment brand of Hong Kong-listed 移卡 (9923.HK), has seen explosive growth. In Q1 2026, its overseas payment transaction volume reached RMB 2.44 billion, representing approximately 4x year-on-year growth. The company has been systematically increasing AI R&D investment since 2023, rolling out AI CRM and AI Shop agent products through its overseas ecosystem subsidiary Fuyu, deeply embedding them in merchant acquisition, operations, and conversion. YeahPay’s approach is to build an integrated platform that combines domestic payment, cross-border receipt and payment, fund management, and risk control — all powered by AI for real-time analysis and intelligent decision-making.

Global Card Networks: Visa and Mastercard Accelerate China Push

International players are not standing still. Visa and Mastercard have both intensified their China presence in 2026. In January, Visa partnered with Apple to allow Chinese cardholders to bind Visa cards to Apple Pay for cross-border payments. Mastercard followed in April, expanding Apple Pay support to cards issued by Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, CITIC Bank, and Pudong Development Bank. Both companies’ CEOs visited China in 2026, signaling the strategic importance of the Chinese market.

Visa’s China business focuses on cross-border payment scenarios including study abroad, travel, and cross-border e-commerce. According to Mordor Intelligence, China’s payment market is expected to reach $47 trillion in 2026 and exceed $70 trillion by 2031 — a prize too large to ignore.

Meanwhile, NetsUnion Clearing Corporation’s “foreign card domestic binding” model now supports overseas residents binding Visa and Mastercard cards to domestic wallets, achieving daily transaction volumes exceeding 100,000 transactions.

5. The Real-World Challenges: Fragmentation, Compliance, and Resource Gaps

For all the excitement around AI and growth, the cross-border payment industry faces formidable challenges — challenges that directly affect the businesses that rely on these services.

Emerging Market Fragmentation

Africa and Latin America are the incremental markets for Chinese cross-border trade — but they are also the most fragmented. As PingPong Product Operations Director Peng Zhong explained: “For foreign trade enterprises, Africa is by no means a single market, but 54 highly fragmented ‘capital islands’, requiring dealing with dozens of economies with vastly different foreign exchange controls, inflation rates, and sovereign credit. It’s impossible to penetrate Africa with a single US dollar system.”

The pain points are severe: strict foreign exchange quota approvals, high exchange rate volatility, compliance-related account freezing risks, and low transfer efficiency. Latin America presents similar challenges — in some regions, foreign exchange reserves are insufficient, banking systems are inefficient, and compliance risks from unclear fund sources and underground money changers put foreign trade enterprises’ accounts at constant risk of “indiscriminate collateral damage” and freezes.

Rising Compliance Costs

The regulatory landscape is a moving target. Countries have vastly different rules on AML, cross-border data transfer, and merchant admission — and payment enterprises must simultaneously adapt to multiple entirely different regulatory systems, significantly increasing compliance costs and operational complexity.

As a Helibao executive noted, the complexity of modern cross-border payment services far exceeds ordinary offline acquiring or online collection. For enterprises going global, the core need is no longer simply “receiving payments” — it’s an integrated service encompassing transaction authenticity verification, cross-border exchange compliance arrangements, efficient fund arrival, full-chain intelligent reconciliation, local acquiring network setup, and dual regulatory adaptation.

Uneven Service Resource Distribution

Mainstream institutions’ capabilities are concentrated in Europe and the US, while emerging markets remain underserved. This creates a gap for businesses operating in regions like Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America — the very regions where Chinese trade is growing fastest.

6. What This Means for International Businesses

For international enterprises, law firms, financial institutions, and investors engaging with China, the intelligent cross-border payment revolution is not a distant trend — it’s a present reality that directly affects commercial interests.

• Payment efficiency directly impacts your bottom line. The AI-powered platforms described above are already processing billions in cross-border transactions. Your Chinese partners are likely using these services. Understanding their capabilities — and limitations — can inform everything from supplier payment terms to currency hedging strategies.
• Choose your cross-border payment partners carefully. The industry is consolidating around players with strong license matrices, global compliance capabilities, and AI-powered efficiency. When selecting a payment partner, consider: What licenses do they hold? What is their AI capability? How do they handle compliance across different jurisdictions? Professional Enterprise Credit Reports can help you verify the regulatory standing and operational history of potential partners.
• Due diligence must include payment infrastructure. When vetting a Chinese partner, don’t just look at their balance sheet. Ask about their payment systems, their cross-border capabilities, their compliance record, and how they manage currency risk. These factors can be as critical to a successful partnership as financial health.
• Watch for regulatory developments. The policy momentum behind cross-border payment is only accelerating. The PBOC’s push for a multi-channel, broad-coverage system, the expansion of CIPS, and the growing role of digital RMB in cross-border transactions all point to a future where cross-border payment is faster, cheaper, and more integrated. Official Enterprise Credit Reports provide the authoritative data you need to stay ahead of regulatory changes.

The cross-border payment market in China is not just growing — it’s transforming. The shift from price competition to AI-powered service competition, the deepening of global license networks, and the policy push for a multi-channel system are creating new opportunities and new risks. For international businesses, the message is clear: understand the ecosystem, verify your partners, and stay informed.