At present, WeChat Pay covers more than 300 banks, and supports several overseas credit cards, including JCB, VISA and Mastercard, which means Tencent users will have two mobile payment options.

Wechat pay [Photo via tuchong.com]

The first is for users who have a mainland bank card. At present, WeChat Pay and Tenpay support the binding of the savings cards and credit cards of more than 70 banks by using mainland residents' ID cards, passports, Mainland Travel Permit for Hong Kong and Macao Residents, and Mainland Travel Permit for Taiwan Residents. With any of the above documents and a bank card within the support range, users can easily open WeChat Pay for online and offline consumption.

The second is for users who don't have mainland bank cards. By binding Visa, Mastercard or JCB credit card through regular card-binding methods, users who don't have mainland bank cards can use WeChat Pay in WeChat Wallet's merchants and cooperative brands in e-commerce, O2O, travel, trip, including JDcom, Ctrip, Qunar, Didi, Air China, China Railway Corporation (12306).

Currently, the second type of WeChat Pay only supports consumption, and cannot be used for general transfer and sending red envelopes. However, it can be used for making payments to store owners through the static barcode posted in the stores.

According to WeChat's user behavior report on its foreign users living in China published last year, 64.4 percent of foreign users living in China use WeChat Pay, mainly for transportation, group purchase and take-out, catering, convenience stores, supermarkets, and online supermarkets.

The specific method to bind foreign bank cards with WeChat Pay:

Click “Me”→ “Wallet”

Click on “Bank Card” and choose “Add a New Bank Card”

Enter your card number, select the type of card and the organization to which it belongs, and fill in the card information as well as your personal information.

After filling it out, click “Submit”. When the following picture appears, the binding is successfully completed.

WeChat Pay currently only supports overseas credit cards. You need to verify the card number, expiration date, CVN2, and American and Canadian users need to verify the billing address while binding. Then you will receive a SMS verification code on the phone number you just filled in. After verification, you need to create a 6-digit payment password before you can use the services.