Uniform payment app to boost Yangtze River Delta transport services

Starting December, frequent travelers in the Yangtze River Delta who use the subway, especially those from Shanghai, Hangzhou and Ningbo, are able to use a uniform metro payment app for travel to other cities in the cluster.

The initiative became possible thanks to the new quick response code payment technologies of Alipay, the digital wallet under Ant Financial, a unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Co Ltd.

"Since the metro software and hardware varies across different cities, we developed technologies that enable passengers of these cities to pass the subway gate within 0.3 seconds, supported by our cloud-computing terminal testing platform," Liu Xiaojie, general manager for urban services from Alipay, told China Daily.