While mobile payments bring great benefits like convenience, flexibility and efficiency, they are not without risks. Among them, the data privacy risk is probably one of the most serious, which is largely caused and exacerbated by the involvement of multiple players and the extensive collection of personal information. China has been trying to consolidate and modernize its regulatory regime for data privacy to suit the needs of the new digital era. China has made great efforts to enact new laws and regulations to delineate the scope of personal information, introduce the obligations for data controllers and processors and incorporate the principles of the Fair Information Practices. However, there are some remaining concerns; the ineffective requirements of consent and disclosure, the ambiguous principle of purpose limitation and the limited applicability of the principle of data minimization. There is a need for China to enact a specific law for data protection, establish a unified law enforcement agency and enhance private and public enforcement. The issue of data privacy is not unique or limited to mobile payment and can apply to other sectors of Fintech and even beyond.

China has become one of the leaders in the global mobile payment market in terms of market volume, growth rate and innovation capability. This can be attributed to a number of enabling factors, including technological advancement in China, mobile payment’s competitive advantages and its wide acceptance by the Chinese people. Mobile payment brings significant benefits as well as various risks and thus should be regulated in a way that reaps its benefits while containing the risks. Over the past decade, China has gradually established a regulatory regime which is composed of various rules issued by different regulators in a piecemeal manner. China’s regulatory regime for mobile payment has several key elements, such as the entry and exit mechanism, management of customer reserves, anti-money laundering measures and consumer protection. The Chinese regulation has strengths and shortcomings, particularly in relation to the overall structure and approach of the regulation. There is also a need to address the negative effects on competition in the mobile payment market that may be brought by the high entry threshold and the centralized clearing mechanism.

The past five years have seen a remarkable rise of entrepreneurial companies in digital technology. Chapter 5 examines this phenomenon through several case studies of e-commerce firms from various emerging economies: Alibaba (China), Flipkart (India), Jumia (Nigeria), and Mercado Libre (Argentina). It probes the business models aligned with the local environments these firms have honed, resulting in innovations such as pay-on-delivery, as well as different logistics and modes of delivery. It investigates the extent to which these firms have proven disruptive in their respective markets, their ability to expand regionally or globally, and future prospects.