China's online payment users top 900m: report

BEIJING -- The number of online payment users in China amounted to 904 million at the end of 2021, a report said Wednesday.

The figure accounted for 87.6 percent of the country's total netizens and was up by nearly 50 million from a year ago, according to the Payment & Clearing Association of China.

China's cashless and cardless trend continues to grow, covering an increasing number of scenarios from ordering food to paying bus fare. Chinese banks handled 102.28 billion such transactions with a combined value of 2,353.96 trillion yuan ($350 trillion) last year, 5.32 times and 2.86 times that of 2012, respectively.

As competition deepens, the sector's market concentration declined last year, according to the association's deputy secretary-general Wang Suzhen.

The top 10 banks in online payment contributed 83.75 percent of the total online payment volume of the association's bank members in 2021, down 7.63 percentage points year-on-year, and the 10 largest payment institutions saw their share down slightly by 0.48 percentage points to 96.25 percent.