Payments behemoth Alipay has set up a special section of its app to promote local merchants in Wuhan, the city where Covid-19 emerged before spreading across the world.
As Wuhan emerges from lockdown, Alipay has moved to help local merchants get back up and running by making it easy for its 900 million users to easily locate them and their respective products and services in the city.
The section allows orders to be placed directly via the Alipay app for local specialty produce, and also enables users to access livestreams of tourist destinations across the city as it begins to open back up.
"We're open" sign at Wuhan bicycle store owned by Fang Qianjin
While initially focused on Wuhan, Alipay says it plans to roll out the initiatives across China.
Merchants can also use Alipay to apply for loans offered by the “Zero Contact” campaign jointly launched by MYbank, an online banking unit of Alipay owner Ant Financial, and 100 banks in China. MYbank will waive interest rates for 360,000 offline micro merchants in Wuhan for the first month and cut interest rates by 20% for Hubei merchants outside of the city.
Simon Hu, CEO, Ant Financial, says: "In every hardship, there lies an opportunity to envision and create a brighter future. We firmly believe that, after the COVID-19 outbreak, service providers who are able to tap into the power of digital technologies will come out the strongest."