WeChat Pay will be coming to Malaysia. This will be the first time the payment service platform will be available beyond China and Hong Kong.

Tencent Holdings has applied for the licence to offer local payments services in Malaysia, pending approval. If approved, users in Malaysia will be able to link their local bank accounts to WeChat Pay, using it to make payments for goods and services.

Earlier this year, Alibaba Group also rolled out Alipay in Malaysia, aiming to make it more convenient for tourists from China to make payments without complications posed by currency exchange.

Tencent’s WeChat is China’s most popular social media app with 938 million active users. The company has two payment services, QQ Wallet and WeChat Pay, both garnering over 600 million monthly active users. Alipay said it has over 450 million active users.

Both payment platforms collectively dominate China’s mobile banking market, with 18.8 trillion yuan (RM 11.9 trillion) worth of transactions in the first three months of 2017, according to consultancy Analysys.

At present, WeChat Pay can be used at over 130,000 shops in 13 foreign markets – including in the United States, Europe and Japan – and supports 10 currencies, Tencent said.

Tencent said expanding WeChat Pay overseas required additional layers of regulatory approval, as well as efforts to explain the system to local businesses. Although a statement to Reuters notes that there is no timeline to offer local payment services to more overseas countries, but the company is not discounting any possibilities.

The company noted that their short term priority is still to cater for Chinese tourists and the countries most frequently visited by them, such as Southeast Asia.