Ant Group Expands Payments Partnership With Italy’s Tinaba

Alipay and Tinaba have expanded their partnership to help Italian travelers make payments in Asia.

Tinaba, a Milian-based payments company, announced in a press release the latest iteration of the team-up late Sunday (July 2), saying it would let customers from Italy make cross-border payments via QR code at Alipay+ partner merchants in South Korea and Malaysia.

Beginning next month, the service will be extended into Australia and Qatar, with the goal of eventually covering all of Asia, according to the release.

“By expanding our partnership with Tinaba, we look forward to better connecting Italian and European tourists to Asian markets, offering a great exchange rate, along with digital services and promotions through the power and simplicity of QR code payments,” Guoming Cheng, general manager of Alipay owner Ant Group in Europe and the Middle East, said in the release.

Ant Group and Tinaba have been partners since 2019, allowing Chinese tourists to make payments using Alipay at thousands of businesses in Italy, according to the release.

With the expansion, Tinaba customers can pay with their cellphones and “in their own language without worrying about cash and foreign exchange anymore,” said Tinaba President Matteo Arpe in the release. It allows the company’s customers, “even very young ones, the possibility to move around the world safely just with their cellphones.”

The news comes a little more than a week after Alipay joined forces with Mastercard to present a payment option that lets international visitors go cashless when traveling in mainland China.

Both partnerships are happening at a moment when a resurgence in international travel is offering opportunities to merchants who can offer efficient cross-border payments, as Ivan Guerrero, director of Airlines and Travel EMEA – Digital Commerce Division at Worldline, told PYMNTS in May.

Guerrero pointed to preferred local payment methods as the chief consideration, arguing that there are historical and cultural aspects that make localization a crucial conversion tool.

Another important consideration is optimizing currency conversion.

“If I am in Thailand, if I’m a Thai consumer, I want to ensure that I can pay in my own currency,” he said at the time. “That gives me comfort, that gives me security, and that makes it … easier for me to click on that buy button.”