In July 2025, the Payment and Clearing Association of China (PCAC) commenced trial operations of the Cross-Border Interconnection Payment Gateway — or CPG — initially focused on inbound payments by international visitors at Chinese mainland merchants, with outbound payment scenarios also within the gateway's designed scope.

The CPG was designed to give domestic and international payment institutions a single-point connection into China’s QR payment ecosystem, under the guidance of the People’s Bank of China (PBOC). It replaces a fragmented model in which domestic and overseas institutions negotiated separate bilateral connections, with a standardised framework covering interfaces, transaction monitoring and routing.

Yang Wenhui, chief executive officer of TenPay Global (Singapore), Tencent's cross-border payment platform operating through the Weixin Pay ecosystem, and a designated foreign institution partner for the CPG, described the gateway as a significant development. "[The CPG] is indeed a very critical infrastructure that the regulator has decided to build, and the whole industry has come together to support it," he said.

The scale of the opportunity

China’s inbound tourism sector saw strong growth in 2025: the Ministry of Culture and Tourism recorded over 150 million inbound visits — up 17% year-on-year — with spending exceeding $130 billion, a rise of more than 40%, of which approximately RMB 80 billion ($11.6 billion) was processed via mobile payment platforms.

According to PBOC data, transaction volumes among inbound travellers using mobile payments surged 162% year-on-year in the first half of 2025, with active users exceeding 10 million by September. By that month, the CPG had processed 1.98 million transactions totalling RMB 427 million ($59 million) — early numbers for an infrastructure still in trial, but the first wave of traffic migrating to the unified pipe.

As a foreign institution partner, TenPay Global introduces overseas wallet institutions to the scheme and provides transaction information routing and fund settlement services on their behalf. As a result, Weixin Pay’s network of tens of millions of mainland merchants is accessible to over 40 digital payment providers and national payment networks across more than 10 countries — including PayPal, GrabPay, ShopeePay, Malaysia’s PayNet, Vietnam’s Zalopay, and Singapore’s LiquidPay. “This is just a start,” Yang said. “We have more scheduled in the pipeline.”

Platform distribution and corridor strategy

TenPay Global's commercial approach is deliberately indirect. Rather than building overseas consumer franchises directly, it provides technical and compliance access to partners that already hold local customer relationships.

This model spans three distinct business lines: the CPG-based inbound payments for international visitors; inbound remittances for diaspora communities to recipients in China; and cross-border e-commerce or B2B payments. "We don't go by ourselves to the consumers overseas. Rather, we open our platform to support our partners," Yang said.

"We firmly believe we wouldn't be able to deliver everything by ourselves — even as one of the leading fintech platforms in the world,” he added. “Partnership and coalitions with the industry are very critical."

TenPay Global's remittance business began with a concrete use case: WeChat Pay HK transfers from domestic helpers in Hong Kong to their families in Indonesia and the Philippines. "We saw a tremendous need there which was not yet fulfilled well," Yang said.

From there it expanded to serve the broader Chinese diaspora sending money home, with the strongest traction in more developed economies: the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, Korea and Singapore. World Bank data shows that China received an estimated $48 billion in inbound remittances in 2024, making it the world's third-largest recipient after India and Mexico.

For users, money arriving in the Weixin wallet lands inside the social application the recipient already uses daily, collapsing the last step of the transfer into a notification. "People just do it in WeChat, and then they will be able to complete the transaction in minutes," Yang said.

To date, card networks including Visa and Mastercard Move, global money transfer operators such as Western Union and Remitly, digital payments provider PayPal and regional bank DBS have all connected to TenPay Global’s platform. A February 2026 joint announcement extended the DBS service to direct remittances into Weixin Pay's digital RMB wallet.

In the education corridor, TenPay Global deepened its partnership with education payments platform Flywire in December 2025, extending Weixin Pay to Chinese students in South Korea as well as Malaysia, where Chinese student enrolment has grown fivefold since 2019, according to Flywire — making it one of the fastest-expanding education corridors in the region. "What we are strong in is the China market," Yang said. "What we need is local contacts."

China's gateway in a region of gateways

“Coalitions are never easy,” Yang said. “Naturally people would say I just want to do it by myself, because I can control everything.” The hard part, he added, is rarely commercial. "The announcement is simple. We say, 'Ah, we're partners.' But the real job is not that easy — the more critical part is regulatory, compliance, technology."

Yang reached for an analogy: “One side wants ramen and the other wants spaghetti. How do you combine them in a way that most of the world will enjoy?” His answer is to find common foundations first — shared compliance frameworks, agreed technical protocols — and build differentiation on top.
"Sometimes we look a bit slow," he said, "but we believe in that kind of partnership. Slow is good, because it eliminates a lot of uncertainties. We make sure when we deliver, we deliver things in good shape."

Elsewhere in Asia, that challenge plays out at a regional level. Under the ASEAN Regional Payment Connectivity initiative, national systems including Malaysia’s DuitNow, Thailand’s PromptPay, Singapore’s PayNow, Indonesia’s QRIS and Vietnam’s VietQR are now interlinked through frameworks developed jointly by member central banks.

The scale of China–ASEAN payment flows reflects this growing integration: RMB transactions between China and Malaysia alone reached 102 billion yuan ($14 billion) in the first quarter of 2025, up 27% year-on-year, according to PBOC data. China’s CPG represents a different path to the same destination: a unified national infrastructure that others connect into, rather than a multilateral framework built by consensus.

Agentic payments reshape financial workflows

Agentic payments are, in Yang’s words, “a new area the whole industry is exploring.” The direction is clear — he argues that agentic payment is already happening — but the question, he says, is whether the industry can make it happen in the right way.

AI agents that search for information or help with everyday tasks feel unthreatening, Yang said, but payments carry different risks than other AI tasks. He drew a parallel to recurring billing, which already follows a delegated-authorisation model: the billing organisation obtains consent and acts at the agreed occasion.
Agentic payment extends that same logic. “Now we move with new technologies, we call them agents,” he said. “But which agents can be trusted? Payment is sensitive — when it moves into payment, it’s a different story.”

Industry coordination on standards and protocols is what will make agentic payment work, he said. “Those are the things which will be developed over the next couple of years, and we are one of the active participants in this industry move.”

Industry coordination defines the future of payments

The CPG marks a structural shift in how cross-border QR payments into and out of China are organised — replacing fragmented bilateral arrangements with a single regulated access point that reduces integration costs and establishes common technical and compliance standards for participating institutions worldwide.

TenPay Global's experience across its key business lines demonstrates both the commercial logic of the platform model and the long-term partnerships it requires. The harder question — how shared standards develop across systems with different regulatory traditions — remains open, and becomes more pressing as AI-driven payment execution moves from concept to practice.

Whether in QR interoperability today or agent-led transactions tomorrow, the constraint is no longer connectivity, but coordination across systems.