19/10/2018
Alibaba creates a partnership with Banking Circle
Alibaba has been extremely active lately, and they are looking to expand as much outside of Asia as possible. This is not a new strategy, as they have been extremely aggressive in the past few years. It comes as a logical consequence of expansion their main competitors, eBay and Amazon, are experiencing.
One of the major problems Alibaba had was the lack of a solid partner in cross-border transactions. As a Chinese company, Alibaba had the issue of creating strong partnerships with major financial institutions in the west, and this was more of a political issue than something related to objective reasons.
The fact is that they were for a very long time focused on Asian markets, and there was no real need to make major moves in order to breach into the western markets. Now, the times have changed, and they made their move by partnering with the Banking Circle in order to augment their cross-border transaction capabilities.
Management representatives of the Banking Circle have stated that this partnership will allow customers using Alibaba’s services will now be able to carry out transactions at very favorable terms and that the exchange rates and the speed of transactions will be much improved. It will result in a much easier and much more efficient trade, at the terms that are very similar to local payments.
The representatives of Alibaba, on the other hand, stated that this partnership provides them with a solid option with disruptive technology that fits ideally in their future expansion agenda.
Everything indicates that a new aggressive push should be expected from Alibaba. Will it be enough to challenge Amazon is yet to be seen, but the clash of these proportions will certainly be interesting, and the competition between two giants in the field could only benefit both merchants and customers alike.