(MENAFN- The Peninsula) AFP
Beijing: Yang Qianqian holds out her smartphone to scan a barcode on the mobile of a vendor selling fresh fruit and vegetables at a bustling outdoor market in Beijing.
The dance student is part of an explosion in the use of mobile payment platforms in China as consumers increasingly take out phones instead of cash to pay for everything from a coffee to a language class or a gas bill.
China was the first country in the world to use paper money but centuries later the soaring popularity of mobile payment has some analysts forecasting it could be the first to stop.
The gross merchandise value of third party mobile payment rose more than 200 percent to about $5.6 trillion in 2016 from a year earlier, according to China-based iResearch.
The growth of the cash-free system has been supported by China's rapidly expanding e-commerce market as Chinese shoppers increasingly shun bricks and mortar stores.
According to estimates China's mobile payment market is already 40-50 times larger than the United States. Alipay, started by e-commerce giant Alibaba and now owned by its affiliate Ant Financial, and WeChat Pay, which is built into Tencent's popular messaging service, have hundreds of millions of users between them and are China's dominant payment platforms. In Beijing it is hard to find a product or a service that cannot be purchased with a mobile.
At the fresh produce market, stallholders display barcodes on tables laden with fruit and vegetables for customers to scan.
Some restaurants in the capital no longer accept bank notes while it is common for motorbike taxis, street food carts and hair salons to offer mobile payment.
Mobile accounted for eight percent of the total value of retail payments in 2015 and is expected to reach 12 percent in 2020, according to a report published in April by UN-backed Better Than Cash Alliance.
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