Cross-border payments in 2025: From “earning transaction fees” to “embracing businesses globally”

Since 2025, the activity of cross-border trade and personnel exchanges in China has rebounded significantly, injecting strong momentum into the development of cross-border payments. On December 25th, a visit was made to Beijing’s Blue Harbor, the first “inbound consumer-friendly shopping district” in China. During the Christmas season, many foreign consumers were seen browsing and making convenient payments. During the visit, Amy (pseudonym) and her family from Ecuador were interviewed. Amy said she had downloaded WeChat Pay and Alipay before coming to China. “Today is my sister’s and my first day in China, specifically to spend Christmas with our parents. My parents have been in China for a month, and the family plans to stay here for one year and two months,” Amy added with a smile. From dining to gift purchasing, mobile payment has become their primary method of daily consumption in China. Beyond inbound consumption, a transformation is underway in the cross-border payment industry. Since 2025, the continuous release of policy dividends for cross-border payments, the ongoing improvement of underlying infrastructure, and the empowerment of financial technology are jointly driving the industry away from the previous single-channel funding model, accelerating its evolution towards diversified scenarios, full-chain services, and globalization. A representative from AirCloud stated that this is essentially an inevitable choice for the industry to cope with the diversification of trade scenarios, the refinement of compliance requirements, and the deepening of service needs. The construction of compliance barriers, the upgrading of the entire service chain, and technological empowerment are crucial supports for this transformation, injecting momentum into the upgrading of China’s foreign trade industrial chain. The upgrading of cross-border consumption demand is further driving payment service innovation to penetrate deeper into sub-sectors such as SMEs in foreign trade and digital trade. The past model of focusing only on large-scale corporate transactions while ignoring small-scale individual consumption is no longer viable. In the retail consumption sector, cross-border interoperability using QR codes is rapidly being implemented. When Thai tourists pay for meals in Shanghai using their local wallets, or Chinese tourists use UnionPay QuickPass to buy souvenirs on the streets of Brazil, the support of technologies such as real-time currency conversion and optimized cross-border clearing processes compresses the settlement process, which originally took hours or even days, into seconds. The so-called “cross-border interoperability of QR code payments” refers to the technical and business integration between QR code payment networks in different countries and regions, enabling wallets and merchants in both networks to conduct cross-border payments on each other’s networks. Generally, there are two cooperation models for interoperability. One is government-to-government, where the central banks of the two countries lead the development of a top-level cooperation framework and are responsible for guiding its implementation. UnionPay acts as the external window to connect with overseas networks. Through a single connection with overseas QR code networks, UnionPay can rapidly and massively expand its global QR code acceptance network, such as the NAPAS project in Vietnam and the ASPI project in Indonesia. The other is network-to-network, where UnionPay and local QR code networks implement cross-border interoperability cooperation based on commercial partnerships. From January to November 2025, UnionPay QR code transactions increased by 30% compared to 2024, highlighting the increasingly prominent role of QR code payment interoperability in facilitating personnel exchanges and deepening economic and trade exchanges between China and other countries. Meanwhile, China’s inbound tourism market is also recovering, and payment convenience has increased the spending willingness of inbound tourists, forcing the acceleration of payment network interoperability. Driven by policies facilitating inbound payments, in October of this year, the Uzbekistan QR code network HUMO connected to Alipay+, a global wallet integration gateway under Ant International, marking the successful implementation of innovative cooperation supported by a unified cross-border QR code gateway. In the first three quarters of this year, the number of inbound tourists making inbound transactions through Alipay+ (“outsourcing for internal use”) and Alipay (“foreign card binding for internal use”) increased by 1.6 times year-on-year. Among these, the number of transactions made by inbound tourists using Alipay+ wallets for QR code payments while visiting Beijing increased by 3.5 times. In the future, with the addition of more wallets and QR code networks, overseas tourists will be able to “travel all over China with a single wallet.” The continuous improvement of the underlying infrastructure has provided a broad range of application scenarios for technological innovation. Currently, the RMB Cross-border Payment System (CIPS) covers 189 countries and regions worldwide, processing 4.0295 million transactions in the first half of this year. Meanwhile, the multilateral central bank digital currency bridge (mBridge) has achieved “on-chain clearing” of cross-border funds, facilitating the flow of funds for enterprises “going global” and trade facilitation. The implementation of these infrastructure projects has significantly enhanced China’s independent controllability in cross-border payments. At the same time, policies have also provided crucial support for the diversification of application scenarios. In 2025, several policies were successively introduced, including the “Action Plan for Further Facilitating Cross-border Financial Services in Shanghai International Financial Center” and the “Notice of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange on Further Facilitating Foreign Exchange Settlement to Support the Stable Development of Foreign Trade.” These policies provided an institutional foundation for innovation in cross-border payment scenarios by simplifying procedures and clarifying standards. In June, the People’s Bank of China established the Digital RMB International Operation Center in Shanghai to promote the international operation of the digital RMB and the development of its financial market business, further improving the underlying infrastructure for cross-border payments. Despite the complex international environment, China’s foreign trade remained resilient in 2025. In the first 10 months of this year, China’s goods trade continued its steady growth, with total imports and exports reaching 37.31 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3.6%. As enterprises go global and enter a new stage of refined operation, cross-border payments are accelerating their transformation. The industry has moved beyond simple payment services to integrate full-chain services such as market research, resource matching, and fund management, upgrading from a “fund intermediary” to a “partner for enterprises going global,” to adapt to the diverse needs and compliance challenges of a global market layout. A representative from Payoneer stated that the cross-border e-commerce industry is no longer characterized by extensive operations but rather by a greater emphasis on refined management. Consequently, competition among cross-border e-commerce businesses has evolved beyond simple buying and selling, now focusing on global market expansion and collaborative capabilities. Consumer demands vary significantly across different regions, making multi-market strategies crucial for sellers to achieve stable growth and mitigate operational risks. However, as business scope expands, issues such as multi-currency payments, cross-border settlements, and fund management become increasingly prominent. With the expansion of business scale, the needs of cross-border enterprises have extended beyond payment processing to comprehensive financial management. This year, WorldPay launched the “World Card,” supporting 15 currencies, and the World Wealth wealth management product, allowing businesses to complete the entire process from receiving payments, foreign exchange conversion, fund appreciation, to payment within a single account, reducing the costs and risks associated with cross-platform operations. Addressing challenges such as resource allocation for cross-border sellers, Payoneer recently launched its “Latin America Initiative,” a market plan that aims to help 600 Chinese brand sellers enter the Latin American market within three years, generating $700 million in annual sales. Simultaneously, it will enhance its one-stop, full-stack financial capabilities, helping sellers reduce the complexity of fund management in multi-market operations. For example, in the Mexican market, Payoneer has launched a local payment service for Amazon Mexico, allowing merchants to receive payments directly in their local currency, centrally manage funds across multiple sites, and provide features such as exchange rate reservations, partial withdrawals, and early repayments, helping sellers stabilize costs and improve the flexibility of fund allocation during peak sales seasons. A major challenge for cross-border businesses going global is the diverse payment environments in different overseas markets. For instance, in Southeast Asia, payment channels are fragmented, and the mainstream e-wallets differ from country to country, making it costly for businesses to integrate with each one individually. To address this, PingPong recently released a comprehensive global management solution. Tong Jianlei, Vice President of PingPong Asia Pacific and Head of Global New Consumption Business, stated that facing the challenge of highly fragmented payment channels in the Southeast Asian market, PingPong provides chain brands with a unified aggregated payment solution. This solution integrates mainstream e-wallets and bank cards from various countries, enabling second-level collection and visualized management of store sales revenue. This not only simplifies technical integration but also supports the brand’s large-scale expansion in the local market. A representative from AirForex stated that, at the service level, services extend from simple fund transfers to the entire foreign trade process. Through modular and embedded technologies, financial services are integrated into enterprise business scenarios, achieving a closed loop of “payment + value-added services.” At the technology level, AI and other technologies deeply empower risk control and efficiency, such as machine learning models optimizing transaction monitoring and fund traceability. At the compliance level, leading institutions address the compliance pain points of enterprises going global by establishing global licenses and permits and building a cross-jurisdictional compliance network. According to Worldwide’s Q2 2025 customer survey, 43% of cross-border sellers are concerned about rising compliance costs. Currently, Worldwide has obtained more than 60 payment licenses and related qualifications globally and obtained a Malaysian MSB license this year. It has established local offices in Malaysia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and other locations, and built multilingual service teams. Furthermore, Yika obtained the Arizona MTL state-level payment license in 2025, and had previously obtained licenses such as Hong Kong MSO, Singapore MPI, and US MSB. In terms of merchant solutions, Yika is promoting the overseas expansion of its merchant solutions and local services businesses, which have already been launched in Hong Kong, Macau, and Singapore. In addition, Lianlian Digital has established a global payment license portfolio consisting of 66 payment licenses and related qualifications, and holds a digital asset trading platform license issued by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, covering more than 100 countries and regions and supporting transaction settlement in over 130 currencies. In November, it officially announced the establishment of its overseas headquarters in Hong Kong, marking a new stage of comprehensive deepening in its globalization strategy.