[Quick News] Payment App Wise Now Works in China

China, over the past years, has put a LOT of resources into improving quality of life and ease of living, from parks and urban beautification to expanding its payment systems. If you remember, back in May, PayPal made the big announcement of integrating with China's payment systems, so you can now use it to make payments.

Now... let's talk about the two problems every foreigner in China eventually runs into: getting your own salary out of the country, and then, somehow, still not being able to pay for a Meituan order once you're actually spending money here.

The first issue is a headache for anyone living and working here, while the second one is a hurdle people who have just arrived usually have to sort out.

Wise APP is stepping in to help reduce the friction in both.

Wise makes an announcement

On September 10, Wise walked the Benelux Chamber of Commerce through its answer to both problems, presented by Angel Chan (head of China Banking and Expansion) and Grace Lin (China Banking and Expansion manager). The pitch is "Money Without Borders," which, sure, every fintech says some version of that. But the numbers behind it are the part worth mulling: US$243 billion in FX volume moving through Wise's infrastructure annually, 90-plus banking and payment partners, 160-plus countries across 40 currencies, and a claimed 75 percent of transfers arriving in under 20 seconds. Not a bad flex!

This is a company with 8,000 people whose entire job is cross-border payments, which, when you've spent an afternoon on hold with your home bank trying to explain why you live in Shanghai, sounds like a genuinely nice thing to have on your side.

Sending salaries home, without the runaround

Here's the part built specifically for us. If you're not a resident of the Chinese mainland, you've worked (or currently work) in China, and you've got a valid tax record from the last three years, Wise will let you send CNY out through a fully digital setup: Home, then Send, then add yourself as the recipient, choose CNY, upload your passport and tax record. That's it.

Funding comes in two ways. Bank transfer tops out at 300,000 yuan per transfer. Alipay caps at 50,000 yuan, and yes, you can just scan the QR code straight from your banking app. Your overall annual ceiling scales with your income, how much tax you've actually paid, and how many years of tax records you've got stacked up, so the longer you've been grinding it out here, the more room you get. Money reaches Wise in 0 to 1 working days, then up to two more to land wherever it's going, at the mid-market rate, with the cost shown to you before you confirm anything. No surprise math at the end. That's a step in the right direction.

Paying in China without the 3% tax on being a laowai

Now the flip side, and honestly the more useful slide of the whole deck. You can link your Wise Card directly to Alipay or WeChat, but Wise is upfront that this comes with a 3% fee from the platforms themselves, plus you still need to download the apps and get verified, and even then you can't use it for online shopping, Meituan, or Didi. What we're saying is: linking the card is technically an option, but it's the option you take when you haven't heard about the other three yet.

Here's Jonathan, General Manager of the Benelux Chamber of Commerce, demonstrating how to pay with Wise:

Because there are better options!

Send to WeChat lets Wise personal customers move money straight into someone's verified WeChat wallet (50,000 yuan per transfer, 15 transfers a month, 800,000 yuan a year), instantly, with no 3% skim. It's genuinely the cheapest of the bunch, works for online payments through your WeChat balance, and covers offline QR scanning too. Best for long-term residents who already live inside WeChat anyway.

Scan Alipay+ QR, meanwhile, is for Wise users outside the EU, UK, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brazil. You spend straight from your Wise balance, no Alipay or WeChat download required, no transfer limits at all. The catch: no peer-to-peer sends, no personal QR codes, no paying online. It's built for the person who just landed and doesn't want another app on their phone yet. (Since October 6, users in those excluded markets get their own local schemes in the same scanner instead – PayNow, DuitNow, QR Ph, Pix and friends.)

And then there's sending to a UnionPay card, capped at 33,000 yuan per transaction, with foreign recipients getting an 80,000 yuan daily limit and 400,000 yuan annually, only through a specific list of banks (Bank of Shanghai, ICBC, Bank of Communications, and a handful of others). Instant, no prior setup needed at your bank, useful mostly as a backup channel for pulling in more money from overseas.

One month later: eSIMs and a QR scanner for the world

Since that September briefing, Wise has taken the show global. On October 6, it launched a customizable eSIM alongside an in-app cross-border QR code scanner, calling itself the first app to combine both features for travelers across five continents.

The QR scanner builds directly on the Alipay+ tie-up described above. Wise has wired local payment schemes into one app, including PayNow (Singapore), DuitNow (Malaysia), QR Ph (the Philippines), Pix (Brazil), PromptPay (Thailand), Swiss QR-bill (Switzerland) and Qvik (Hungary) – and, through Alipay+, millions of merchants in the Chinese mainland, where cash and foreign cards remain a gamble. No Chinese bank card, no local phone number, no separate app download.

The eSIM tackles the other half of what Wise calls "arrival anxiety" – landing in a new country with no data and, as a result, banking apps that won't load. You install the eSIM once, then set the exact data allowance and number of days per trip across 150-plus destinations, with refunds on unused data plans if your itinerary changes. The customizable plans are open to Wise customers in the UK, EEA, US, Canada, Brazil, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and New Zealand, and the eSIM itself works on the Chinese mainland too.

The timing tracks with a Wise-commissioned YouGov survey of more than 14,000 travelers: 62 percent lean on hotel Wi-Fi to get online abroad, and almost 40 percent have skipped local experiences like street food markets because they couldn't pay. The pitch is that both problems now live in one app – worth watching whether the reality is as smooth as the slide deck.

"As China becomes a popular destination for international travelers, we've focused on solving the challenges of spending as a visitor, through our partnerships with Alipay+ and WeChat," Angel Chan said in a statement marking the launch.

The zoom out

There's still eligibility paperwork, still a tax record to dig up, still limits that scale with how established you are here rather than how much you need right now. But for a community that has spent years accepting bank counters and 3% surcharges as just the cost of living abroad, having three legitimate, itemized alternatives laid out on a slide, with actual numbers attached, is the kind of small mercy that adds up.

And with eSIMs, pay-as-you-go lounge passes and destination guides now bolted on, the pitch has clearly widened from moving money to managing the whole trip.

Overall, Shanghai has done A LOT to expand and enhance its payment ecosystems, for which we can all say a big "thank you."

In case you missed it, here is some other news on payment expansions in Shanghai:

- Shanghai takes big steps on payment convenience for foreign visitors

- Expats can now use overseas cards to buy Shanghai Metro tickets

- A traveler's guide to payments in China