Mobile payments have transformed China and the rest of the world. Beijing-based QFPay has been there since the beginning. Ahead of his appearance at Cloud Expo Asia in Hong Kong in May, Techerati caught up with founder and CEO Tim Lee
Klaus Schwab’s prediction of a fourth industrial revolution is based on the principle that interconnected cyber-physical systems will facilitate and automate economic interactions and productivity at a scale never before seen.
While not all of his predictions have scaled up, the scale of economic interactions has drastically elevated thanks to mobile payment systems facilitated by high-speed cloud computing. Merchants and consumers can exchange value in more ways, in more locations and faster than ever before.
A company responsible for driving adoption of this technology in Asia (and the world at large) is Beijing-based QFPay, a mobile fintech company that provides a smart payment cloud solution and business platform for merchants. Ahead of his talk at Cloud Expo Asia in Hong Kong, we spoke to Tim Lee about the company’s plans for international expansion.
QFPay
QFPay’s goal, in founder Tim Lee’s own words, is to “build a network” that “wins the market”. The key to success he says is constant innovation. Since Lee founded QFPay in 2011 the fintech has time and again raised the bar for mobile payments.
Two technologies kickstarted the mobile payments revolution. First, the development of mobile point-of sale (POS) terminals allowed merchants of all sizes access to process card payments. Then Host Card Emulation (HCE) came along, for the first time allowing mobile devices to emulate physical cards on any NFC-enabled device. In both areas QFPay was instrumental in setting the standard: developing the world’s first Bluetooth POS and in 2012 launching the world’s first mobile payment reader, two years ahead of PayPal.