Huawei has entered a cooperation agreement with UnionPay International aimed at helping the company roll out its Huawei Pay mobile payment service worldwide.
Huawei Pay was developed in conjunction with UnionPay in 2016, originally for the Chinese market.
Through the expanded collaboration, the two companies plan to make the mobile payment service to users of Huawei and Honor branded smartphones outside of China with UnionPay bank cards at any point of sale machine supporting UnionPay mobile QuickPass.
The first overseas market to implement the service will be Russia, where UnionPay bank cards are accepted at 85% of POS terminals and ATMs.
As with Apple Pay and Google Pay, Huawei Pay uses tokenization technology to protect cardholders' privacy and data security. The chip-based mobile payment service is an all-device solution.
Huawei Pay is already supported by 55 banks in China and is compatible with 20 mobile devices including various smartphones and smart watches. Last year 4 billion yuan ($631 million) worth of payments were made using the service, Huawei said.
“Open sharing is an important direction for the future of the digital economy and intellectual interconnection, which is why Huawei’s end-user cloud services built an open and globalized smart mobile ecosystem for the end-user experience,”Huawei customer cloud service president Alex Zhang said.
“Huawei hopes to work with partners such as UnionPay International to provide more secure and convenient mobile payment services for every user of Huawei smart devices around the world.”