2 billion users shake hands! PayPal wallet is officially connected to WeChat payment, it’s time for foreigners to come to China to scan QR codes

On May 27, an eye-catching news came out of the payment circle: Tencent Tenpay Global and PayPal World officially reached a cooperation, and the PayPal wallet was connected to the WeChat payment system.

One sentence translated into adult language: When a foreigner comes to China, he can open the PayPal wallet on his mobile phone and directly scan the WeChat payment code of the Chinese merchant to pay.

There is no need to change mobile phones, bind domestic bank cards, install a separate WeChat account, or ask friends to pay for you. 2 billion PayPal users and 1 billion WeChat Pay users in China officially shake hands at the payment level.

This thing seems ordinary, but if you break it apart and take a look, there is a hidden war in cross-border payment.

The timeline of this matter needs to be sorted out clearly.

Many people are a little confused after seeing the news in the past two days - they obviously heard about the cooperation between PayPal World and Tenpay in July 2025, so why did it become official again on May 27?

The timeline is like this:

July 23, 2025: PayPal announced the launch of the PayPal World platform in the United States, announcing its first partners - India's UPI, Brazil's Mercado Pago, China's Tenpay, and its own Venmo. Claims to provide cross-border payment interconnection for 2 billion users
September 2025: PayPal and WeChat Pay complete the first batch of interconnection tests, and some scenarios are put into trial operation
May 27, 2026: Tencent Tenpay Global and PayPal World officially reached a cooperation, and the QR code scanning function for global PayPal users in China was officially launched

So this time it is a truly usable node - not the cooperation intention at the press conference, but the full launch of users who can scan the QR code to pay when they come to China with PayPal.

The pain of foreigners coming to China to pay is finally solved

To understand the significance of this matter, we must first talk about how painful it was for foreigners to make payments in China in the past.

Several ways for foreigners to pay in China in the past few years:

Route A: Change a Chinese mobile phone number + bind a Chinese bank card - only worth it if you have to stay in the country for more than a few months, ordinary tourists find it troublesome
Route B: Let WeChat Pay bind overseas cards - Visa, Mastercard, etc. will be supported in 2024, but there are single transaction limits, some merchants do not support it, and exchange rate fees
Route C: Cash / Let a friend pay on your behalf / Apple Pay - In practice, it is a firecracker. Many small stores in China do not accept cash at all.
Route D: Install Alipay/WeChat to register overseas users - a complete set of KYC is required, and the download may not be available in local stores

PayPal's solution for accepting WeChat payment directly bypasses all pain points: users continue to use the PayPal they are accustomed to, and the balance in the wallet goes through the settlement channel of PayPal World. When it reaches the merchant, it is a normal WeChat payment.

What is it like to experience

An American tourist came to Shanghai and entered a Xiaolongbao shop. Checkout 38 bucks.

The old method: pay in cash (many stores don’t accept it), or find a Visa POS machine (which may not be available), or scan the WeChat code awkwardly and find that PayPal cannot be scanned.

New method: Take out your mobile phone, open the PayPal App, click Scan Code, align it with the store's WeChat payment code, enter the amount, and confirm. The store normally receives a WeChat payment on its mobile phone.

What happened behind the scenes:

PayPal debits USD balance
Go in the middle PayPal World cross-border clearing
Tenpay transfers RMB to merchants according to the real-time exchange rate
What the merchant receives is a standard WeChat payment.

There is almost no modification on the merchant side - it is still the original WeChat payment code and the original WeChat payment logic. This is the most exciting part of this collaboration.

What exactly is PayPal World?

PayPal World is not a new app, it is a wallet interconnection network. Its logic is: all leading wallets/payment systems in various countries are connected to this hub. Users complete payments in their own Apps, and backend liquidation goes through cross-border channels. Users do not need to switch Apps, manage exchange rates, or worry about what wallet the other party uses.

The first partners to join:

Indian UPI (400 million+ users)
Brazil Mercado Pago (150 million+ users)
China Tenpay (1 billion+ users)
US Venmo (60 million+ users)

Counting PayPal's own 400 million active users, the network's reach is 2 billion.

This is not the first time PayPal has done cross-border, but it is the first time PayPal has done cross-border as a platform - it used to be a one-to-one connection, but now it is a network.

This is WeChat Pay’s conspiracy

Why is it said to be a conspiracy of WeChat Pay? Because in this cooperation, WeChat Pay is almost a zero-cost winner.

For WeChat payment:

There are 2 billion more potential cross-border user sources overnight
Zero modification and zero education cost for merchants
You don’t have to go overseas to market, negotiate compliance, and do localization yourself.
The payment experience is exactly the same as that of domestic users

For PayPal:

Users can seamlessly spend money in China (all 14 million WeChat payment merchants in China are open)
PayPal does not need to build its own payment license or set up an acquiring network in China
Increase your global network value with PayPal World

For foreign users:

When you come to China for tourism, business trip or study abroad, you no longer have to worry about payment issues.
No need to change apps, no card binding, no KYC required

The only person who may have mixed feelings is Alipay.

What about Alipay?

Alipay has an earlier layout in cross-border. In 2024, a complete set of products including Tour Pass, binding overseas cards, overseas Alipay (AlipayHK, Alipay+ Wallet Alliance), etc. will be launched.

Alipay+ has many wallets connected to this system:

South Korea Kakao Pay
Malaysia Touch n Go
Hong Kong AlipayHK
Indonesia DANA, Philippines GCash, etc.

But Alipay+ mainly covers the Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asia regions. In mainstream European and American markets, Alipay's presence has always been inferior to PayPal.

Now that WeChat Pay has directly taken over PayPal, the main channel in Europe and the United States, it is equivalent to adding a large piece of the key puzzle in the cross-border scenario.

In the future, Alipay will definitely have to deal with:

Some of the key accounts for European and American customer traffic were eaten up by PayPal × WeChat
Innovative businesses such as Token Pay/AI payment need to maintain first-mover advantage
Alipay+ needs to speed up the expansion of European and American wallet access

This is a standard you-take-your-cards-I-take-mine-cards battle.

There is also a set of data released during the same period that is worth looking at

On the same day of May 27, WeChat also announced another data: the number of monthly active users of WeChat mini games exceeded 500 million.

It's very interesting to look at these two things together -

WeChat Pay: Capture 2 billion global PayPal cross-border traffic entrance
WeChat Mini Games: A lightweight entertainment portal with 500 million monthly active users

What WeChat is doing is to transform itself from a domestic super App into a cross-border, cross-scenario, and cross-user type super payment/service node.

What does it mean to ordinary people

If you are a domestic merchant: You don’t need to do anything, the original WeChat payment code can collect money from foreigners. The conversion rate of overseas passenger flow may be significantly improved, especially in scenic spots, airports, hotels, chain restaurants and other scenes.

If you often go abroad: It is currently not possible to use WeChat payment to directly scan PayPal merchants. The direction is one-way (foreigners coming to China scan WeChat codes). But the reverse channel is expected.

If you are doing cross-border e-commerce: This new channel will not directly affect e-commerce payment collection in the short term, but will mainly be used in offline QR code scanning scenarios. However, the liquidation logic of cross-border wallets may change in the medium to long term.

If you do SaaS, Agent, or AI applications: the standardization trend of cross-border wallet interconnection has taken shape. In the future, the infrastructure for Agent's autonomous cross-border payment is rapidly being built, which is a direction worth planning in advance.

The true weight of this matter

Taking a longer view, the cooperation between PayPal × WeChat Pay is essentially a partial reconstruction of the global payment order.

In the past few decades, the global cross-border payment pattern has been:

Visa/Mastercard dominates card clearing
SWIFT dominates interbank messaging
PayPal dominates cross-border wallets on the Internet

Although China has two super wallets, WeChat Pay/Alipay, they have always been relatively independent systems on the international stage. Either use your own Alipay+ or UnionPay.

By joining the PayPal World network this time, WeChat Pay is directly connected to PayPal's existing global clearing/compliance/brand network - it not only retains its own wallet independence, but also gains global interconnection capabilities.

This cooperation method may become the mainstream model of cross-border payments in the next few years: instead of one company being the only one, the top wallets in each country jointly form a global payment ecosystem through interconnection networks.

May 27th is likely to be a day that makes a mark in global payments history.