Mobile payments in Japan, South Korea and China: Cross-border convergence or divergence of business models?

• Aims to predict emerging mobile payment business models in China.
• Compares Chinese market to more mature Japanese and South Korean markets.
• In China, critical role of 2010 regulations on non-financial institutions.
• Contrary to expectations, third-party payment platforms benefited from 2010 laws.
• Chinese market unlikely to converge soon to either Japanese or Korean models.

Competitive pressures created by the global market, and the demonstration of market potential in one country influences the incentives to adopt successful technologies and business models in similar countries. In this paper, we explore how mobile payment operation models might evolve in China, using the more mature Japanese and South Korean markets for comparison. Comparing existing business models in the three countries, we argue that regulation has affected both the industry structure and the vertical linkages of the different participants in the mobile payments ecosystem. We predict that rather than converging onto the mobile payment models of Japan or South Korea, the Chinese mobile payment industry is likely to see the coexistence of competing business models in the intermediate term. We attribute this to the contradictory incentives created by Chinese financial sector regulation for the participants in the mobile payments industry.