--FILE--A Chinese mobile phone user shows the icons of the mobile apps (from left) messaging app Weixin, or WeChat, of Tencent, mobile wallet UnionPay Wallet launched by China UnionPay and Alipay, the online payment service of Alibaba's Ant Financial, on his smartphone in Ji'nan city, east China's Shandong province, 11 June 2017. China's mobile payments totaled 81 trillion yuan (about 12.77 trillion U.S. dollars) as of October 2017, the world's largest volume, official data showed. The volume was much more than the whole of 2016, which stood at 58.8 trillion yuan, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The country's third-party mobile payment market has continued rapid expansion as cashless transactions have gained increasing popularity across the country. The value of third-party e-payments in China has grown at an annual rate of more than 100 percent since 2015, offering consumers an alternative to bank payment channels at lower transaction costs, global rating agency Moody's said in a report earlier last year.
