Adoption of mobile payments happened at lightning speed. The two companies began experimenting with payment-by-scan in 2014 and deployed at scale in 2015. By the end of 2016, it was hard to find a shop in a major city that did not accept mobile payments. Chinese people were paying for groceries, massages, movie tickets, beer, and bike repairs within just these two apps. By the end of 2017, 65 percent of China’s over 753 million smartphone users had enabled mobile payments.
