On December 6, 2016, Alipay landed at the Arctic Circle, announcing the official launch of the 12.12 global shopping festival. The world famous Finnish Arctic Santa Claus village will fully introduce Alipay, which is the first time that the Santa Claus village opens mobile payment, marking the Chinese the mobile payments with Alipay as the representative are leading the globe. To witness the global consumption feast, Rovaniemi, where the Santa Claus Village is located, sets a first-of-its-kind, 3.6-meter permanent landmark. With access to Alipay, Chinese tourists not only can make payments by Alipay in the Arctic Santa Claus village, but also can search for nearby services such as foods and amusements. This is the second offline application scenarios in the expansion of Finland followed the Helsinki airport. This year, Alipay enlarged its layout in the European market. As of November this year, Alipay has mounted an invasion to UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Finland, Austria and the Czech Republic, covering department stores, airports, restaurants and other application scenarios. Chinese tourists can also use Alipay to pay Uber and rebate. Different from the past, this move not only relies on mobile payment technology, but also O2O platform capabilities. In September this year, Alipay launched an O2O marketing platform “Discovery” to the overseas market, allowing the foreign businesses to release O2O marketing information tailored to China's outbound users. When users is in a foreign country, the “Word of Mouth” in the Alipay will be automatically become the "Discovery" that can inform the user of the current city and surrounding services, and can push targeted information about business promotions by using big data to analyze users’ favors. At present, "Discovery" platform has entered more than 100 countries and regions. Among them, in Europe, "Discovery" platform is available in Britain, France, Germany, Netherlands and other 20 countries and regions, 381 cities, covering more than 50,000 businesses. "Not only mobile payments, we will open the big data and mobile platform capabilities to the Europe and global ecological partners, to provide more local services for the rapid growth of China's outbound tourists," said Douglas Feagin, president of International Division of Ant Financial. As of now, there are 100,000 overseas stores having access to Alipay’s mobile payment service, covering 60% of China's outbound tourists. Feagin hopes the launch of “Word of Mouth” of the 12.12 global shopping festival in Europe could expand the influence in the US and the European markets further. According to reports, this year, more than one million businesses would participate in the festival, attracting 70,000 offline businesses from 16 countries and regions including Australia, the United States, UK, Germany, France, Finland, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. From the Santa Claus Village of Arctic Circle to the Waitmo Cave of New Zealand, Alipay covers half of the earth.
Alipay is now available in the Arctic Circle , launching at the Finnish Arctic Santa Claus Village , which is offering mobile payments for the first time . Chinese tourists will be able to use Alipay to search for nearby services such as food and entertainment , as well as to make payments . The attraction is the second one to use the payment system in Finland , with the first being Helsinki Airport . Alipay has been expanding across the European market and is now available in the UK , Germany , France , the Netherlands , Austria and the Czech Republic .