QR code payments make long commutes even longer in China

NFC availability is growing, but 100 million WeChat users are now paying for public transit with QR codes

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Rush hour in China is not the place to be fumbling with your phone. (Picture: Shutterstock)

Published: 9:50am, 5 Aug 2019Updated: 9:50am, 5 Aug 2019

Imagine taking the subway during rush hour in a major metropolitan area. After making your way through the crowd, fighting your way to the turnstile, you’re stopped by a single person fumbling with a phone and holding up other disgruntled commuters.

The holdup has become a common scene in many of China’s cities because of an important piece of technology central to mobile payments in the country: QR codes.

The ubiquity of mobile payments in China means that when it comes time to pay, most people are tapping through their phones to get to the right app and pull up the QR code. Companies have even found workarounds to allow refreshing the codes when users are offline, like during a flight without Wi-Fi.

But typically, generating and scanning a QR code is quick, and it was a cheap technology to implement. Once it became the default payment system, it was only a matter of time before it started invading public transportation. This is in spite of the fact that that NFC (near field communication), which is used by Apple Pay and Google Pay (among many others), is considered faster and more secure and has even proliferated in China over the years as costs have come down.

Paying with QR codes is deeply ingrained in China, where people have been happy to use them on subways and buses in lieu of transit cards. Tencent announced this week that since its launch two years ago, the WeChat mini program Ride Code has grown to 100 million users, all paying for public transportation with the app’s QR codes.