TikTok China Launches Digital Payment Tool, Douyin Pay

TikTok Illustration (Nikuga / Pixabay)

JAKARTA - ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, launched its first digital payment service for the Chinese version of the TikTok application, named Douyin Pay. In his country, TikTok is better known as Douyin.

This move is considered a good step forward as it continues to expand into previously uncharted territory in the e-commerce business segment of the Chinese market.

In an official statement, Douyin said that Douyin Pay will complement the existing payment options while working to build a superior customer experience for users of alternative payment platforms.

"The establishment of Douyin Pay aims to complement the existing major payment options; it will ultimately improve the user experience," said a Douyin spokesman.

With more than half a billion daily users on the platform, Douyin has officially joined Alipay and WeChat Pay, which are the payment platforms that are available today.

ByteDance itself gained a foothold in payment services in China when its founder and CEO Zhang Yiming acquired Wuhan Hezhong Yibao Technology Co in 2020.

At the time of the acquisition, Hezhong Yibao turned out to have had a third-party payment license from the Central Bank of China since 2014.

In China, ByteDance is under heavy pressure from the US President, Donald Trump, who is tough on Chinese businesses and even TikTok assets in the US have to be divested due to national security threats.

ByteDance also confirmed that it was not a security threat and continued to deny the allegations. The company has been in discussions with Walmart and Oracle to transfer some of its assets to a new company so that it is not tainted.

Douyin is the main source of income for ByteDance. The platform started sales four years ago and is now able to operate a fast-growing e-commerce platform where more than 600 million users shop online every day.

ByteDance's expansion coincided with the tightening of regulatory and supervisory functions by China's financial regulators to prevent a monopolistic tendency in the mobile payments segment of the financial services architecture.

The launch of Douyin Pay appears to coincide with the 2021 Lunar New Year holiday; one of the big days in China.