- Screenshot of Line’s payment system, called Line Pay.
- Line
Line, which operates Japan’s most popular smartphone messaging app, is moving quickly to expand Line Pay, a mobile-payment system it launched in December.
The Japanese unit of Korean Internet giant Naver said Tuesday it has signed an agreement with CyberSource, a U.S.-based global e-commerce payment company owned by Visa, to work together as strategic partners.
Financial terms weren’t disclosed.
Line said the alliance with CyberSource, whose payment management and security services are used by over 400,000 businesses worldwide, is aimed at accelerating Line Pay’s growth outside Japan, but declined to share details of their planned cooperation.
Line Pay’s success is far from guaranteed, especially outside Japan. Just about all of the major players in mobile technology and services, from Google and Apple to Samsung Electronics, are trying to gain control over payments.
While Apple has been promoting its Apple Pay, Samsung bought mobile-payments company LoopPay last month and just unveiled a smartphone payment system calledSamsung Pay this week. In China, the world’s largest smartphone market, local Internet giants Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings both run their own mobile payment systems, which are used by hundreds of millions of consumers for online shopping, taxi-hailing and various other purposes.
Line’s mobile messaging service has over 181 million active users globally, and is popular in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. Line Pay represents the next big challenge for the company. In January, Line also launched a taxi-hailing service in Japan called Line Taxi, which lets passengers pay for their rides using Line Pay.
Payments within Line’s messaging app, such as the purchases of stickers – emoticons featuring cartoon characters that people can send to one another – can be handled by Line Pay. But Line wants to expand Line Pay far beyond the messaging app.
Earlier this week, Line said several online-shopping sites in Japan, including a marketplace called Zozotown and music store HMV Online, will start accepting Line Pay.
