Alipay, a leading mobile payment system in China, will start to charge service fee for cash withdrawal starting from today. It means that transferring money out of Alipay and back into a bank account will not be free.
The company says this move comes as a result of rising costs.
Alipay users will have a free withdrawal quota of 20,000 yuan, or around 3,000 dollars per year.
A fee of 0.1 percent of each withdrawal will be charged when the quota is used up.
Alipay users can raise the quota by earning points for using Alipay services.
Other forms of payment and money transfers, including those on Yuebao, an investment fund from Alipay's holding company Ant Financial Services Group, continue to be free.
The latest move by Alipay comes just more than half a year after a similar one by Tencetns' WeChat Payment in March.
For more on this, CRI's Ding Heng spoke earlier with John Ross, senior fellow of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University.
