Visa and Tencent Team Up on Cross-Border Payments After Beijing Clears Expansion

Tencent and Visa said on Thursday that they had signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on payments for travelers moving in and out of China, on cross-border transfers, and on AI-assisted shopping. The two companies have been cooperating since at least 2019, when Visa laid out plans to let international cardholders pay through WeChat Pay in China.

The agreement comes days after China's central bank, the People's Bank of China, cleared Visa to start preparing a domestic bank card clearing business. That approval, issued earlier this month, moves Visa toward operating in China's domestic payments market after more than 40 years in the country. Citi received a separate approval from the China Securities Regulatory Commission last week to set up a wholly owned securities company in Shanghai. Citigroup Securities (China) will handle equities brokerage, underwriting, research, and principal trading, and Citi said it still has regulatory steps to finish before it opens for business.

Under the memorandum, the companies will work on making payments easier for travelers entering and leaving China, and they will expand the transfer service they already run together. The plan also includes letting travelers pay participating merchants through Weixin Pay and Visa's network, subject to regulatory requirements. Visa Direct, the company's transfer service, would be used to send money from overseas users into the Weixin Pay system.

The two also plan to work on agentic commerce, in which AI agents help shoppers find, select, and buy goods or services. Dowson Tong, Tencent's senior executive vice president and CEO of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group, said the partnership would pair Tencent's AI work with Visa's global network. "We hope to create more seamless commerce experiences for consumers and new opportunities for businesses, both in China and internationally," he said.

Visa is not the only foreign payments company expanding in China. Mastercard and Tencent's international payments platform Midas said in December last year that they would bring Mastercard's Click to Pay and payment security tools into Midas's overseas payment solutions. The approvals follow bilateral meetings in Bangkok, where U.S. officials raised market access for Mastercard, Visa, and Citi with Chinese counterparts, according to a U.S. Treasury official cited in previous reporting. The same official said the approvals were part of an agreement reached by President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping during their meeting in Washington last month.