WeChat Pay, Flywire make Chinese students' overseas tuition payments 'as easy as sending a chat'
Tencent Holdings' WeChat Pay e-wallet unit and US payments platform Flywire have streamlined the payments process for Chinese students abroad, making it easier for them to pay their tuition fees as part of a new partnership.
Boston, Massachusetts-based Flywire, a major cross-border payments platform for universities globally, said on Thursday that the "direct connection" with WeChat Pay - known as Weixin Pay in mainland China - would make it easier for Chinese students and their families to make tuition payments from China.
"Flywire has long offered Weixin Pay as a payment method, but the direct connection with Tencent makes the payment experience more convenient and streamlined," Mohit Kansal, Flywire's senior vice-president of global payments and payer services, said in a statement without providing further details.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
Chinese users can also make payments on Flywire through Alipay, another major e-wallet in China operated by Ant Group, Union Pay, credit cards and bank transfers. Ant is an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post.
The new partnership comes amid rising cross-border activity following the reopening of China's borders. A rising number of Chinese students are seeking higher education abroad after Beijing dropped its stringent Covid-19 control policies late last year.
In January, the Chinese Service Centre for Scholarly Exchange, an education agency responsible for verifying foreign higher education qualifications, said that it would no longer recognise foreign certificates gained through remote studying - a common arrangement during the pandemic. Chinese students must, therefore, return to in-person classes at overseas universities.
"As more Chinese students are eager to study abroad again, we're confident that Flywire will enable our users to improve their international payment experience, and make paying for education as easy as sending a chat," said Wenhui Yang, general manager of Tencent Financial Technology Asia-Pacific.
Flywire's total payments volume was US$18.1 billion in the 2022 financial year. It generated US$267.1 million in revenue, with 25 per cent generated from US cross-border education, 49 per cent from international cross-border education and 7 per cent from domestic education. Flywire's company revenue from the education segment amounted to US$216.4 million.
Chinese students comprise the biggest percentage of international students globally despite a dip in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a whitepaper published in April by Beijing-based think tank Centre for China and Globalisation and US education organisation Educational Testing Service.
China has also been the biggest source of international students in the US for 15 consecutive years since 2008, the report said. From 2021 to 2022, 290,000 Chinese studies enrolled in US universities, accounting for 30 per cent of the country's international students.
The new partnership with Flywire also comes amid WeChat's expanded efforts in cross-border payments. This month, the e-wallet started allowing payments through Visa and other international bank cards, allowing foreign travellers to use their smartphones to pay tens of millions of merchants across China.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2023 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
