Hang Jia wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about QR payments when he first encountered them. In fact, he thought they were rather easy to tamper with.
A fraudster could replace a merchant’s QR code overnight, leaving unsuspecting customers sending their money straight into someone else’s wallet.
But QR payments these days have since become safer, with providers introducing measures such as dynamic QR codes that can generate a fresh code for each transaction, reducing the risk of static-code tampering.
Having spent years helping UnionPay expand across the Americas, Hang knew how important security was when handling people’s money.
His experience had also exposed him to the limitations of conventional card payments.
Smaller merchants in developing markets often struggled to afford payment terminals, and some didn’t even have the electricity needed to operate them.
QR payments offered an affordable way around those barriers, eventually convincing Hang that the technology was worth pursuing.
He joined Ant Group in 2015 and helped shape its international strategy, including the early thinking behind a network of local e-wallets that eventually became Alipay+.
Today, as Executive Chairman of DCS Group, Hang has another prediction. He believes stablecoins could eventually replace fiat currencies in a growing share of payments.
During a conversation with Vincent Fong on the Fintech Fireside Asia podcast, Hang looked back on the experiences that shaped his thinking, sharing some rather unusual stories along the way.
UnionPay Struggled to Win Over US Merchants. Then Came a Bag of Cash
Hang joined UnionPay in 2006 and later moved to New York to help expand its acceptance network across the Americas. Winning over American merchants was difficult, especially before Chinese tourism had taken off.
Chinatown seemed like a sensible place to start, so his team subsidised payment terminals and trained restaurant staff to accept UnionPay cards. Yet transactions remained disappointingly low.
Curious about what was happening, Hang visited a Chinese restaurant as an ordinary customer and asked to pay with UnionPay.
The cashier encouraged him to use cash instead, only retrieving the terminal from a drawer after he insisted he had none.
Hang attributed the preference for cash partly to tax considerations. Clearly, installing payment terminals hadn’t been enough to persuade merchants to use them.
His team subsequently approached duty-free retailers, where an unexpected encounter in Hawaii helped change the conversation.
During a meeting with store executives in Waikiki, a Chinese couple arrived looking to purchase an expensive watch. The woman opened her Louis Vuitton bag, revealing so much cash that three cashiers had to help count it.
Hang seized the opportunity to ask whether the executives were comfortable accepting such large payments without knowing where the money came from.
Processing purchases through UnionPay, he argued, would provide greater traceability through the banking system.
The encounter helped persuade the retailer, and duty-free stores became one of UnionPay’s early successes in the US.
Panda. A Nickname That Followed Him All the Way to Ant
Building UnionPay’s business overseas came with personal sacrifices, and Hang’s years in New York were particularly difficult for his young family.
He had only recently returned to China from Canada when UnionPay asked him to relocate to the US.
His wife was expecting their first child, and having just settled back in Shanghai, he wasn’t particularly keen on leaving again.
Still, he accepted the opportunity, which meant spending much of his daughter’s early childhood thousands of kilometres away.
One winter, Hang was speaking to his wife and daughter over a video call from New York.
Bundled up in thick black-and-white clothes against the cold, he apparently looked enough like a panda for his little girl, then around two years old, to start calling him one.
Recalling the memory during the podcast, Hang choked up.
He spoke about how difficult those years had been emotionally, especially while trying to develop UnionPay’s business in a new market so far from his family.
The nickname stayed with him, and years later, when colleagues at Ant Group asked him to choose a nickname, he went with Panda.
What began as a childhood observation had become a personal reminder of his daughter.
Looking back, Hang said he had no regrets about moving to New York, despite the years he had spent apart from his family.
His experience there had given him the opportunity to understand the card industry more deeply, knowledge that would eventually influence his approach to newer payment technologies.
The Idea Hang Pitched Before Joining Ant
Back in Shanghai by 2013, Hang began taking a closer look at Alipay’s experiments with QR payments.
Although he initially had reservations about their security, his experience expanding UnionPay into Mexico and South America had shown him how difficult it was to bring card payments to merchants with limited resources.
As QR technology improved, Hang became increasingly convinced of its potential and eventually joined Ant Group in 2015.
Interestingly, he recalled raising another idea during his interview with the company.
Ant wanted to become a global payments provider, but operating its own wallet in every country would involve substantial licensing costs and regulatory complications.
Asked how Alipay should approach international expansion, Hang suggested building a network that connected locally operated wallets.
“You should not run your own wallet everywhere. You should try to connect wallets from everywhere,” he explained.
His thinking contributed to two strategies known internally as GLocal and GNet.
GLocal involved investing in domestic e-wallet businesses and providing them with technology, while local partners retained majority ownership.
“It must be a local brand and local business,” Hang said.
GNet focused on connecting those wallets across borders so customers could continue using their familiar payment apps while travelling.
According to Hang, the concept eventually developed into what we now know as Alipay+.
The approach supported the growth of some of Southeast Asia’s biggest e-wallets, including Malaysia’s Touch ‘n Go eWallet, Indonesia’s DANA and the Philippines’ GCash.
Naturally, Vincent wanted to know how Ant managed to identify the right partners. Malaysia alone had dozens of competing e-wallets at one point, and choosing which companies to back couldn’t have been straightforward.
“Actually, we don’t know,” Hang admitted.
Even Ant Didn’t Know Which E-Wallets Would Win
Ant approached various potential partners, looking closely at their existing customer bases and whether they had services people already used regularly.
Touch ‘n Go stood out because millions of Malaysians were familiar with its stored-value cards, especially for toll payments.
Its management shared Ant’s belief that mobile wallets could eventually support a much wider range of everyday purchases.
Indonesia offered a different opportunity.
Ant’s 2017 partnership with Emtek initially sought to tap BlackBerry Messenger’s enormous user base, which numbered more than 63 million monthly active users in the country at the time.
Of course, BBM would eventually lose ground to other messaging apps, although DANA went on to establish itself as a major Indonesian e-wallet.
Looking back, some of Ant’s choices might appear obvious, but Hang’s account suggests the company was making those decisions with considerably less certainty than their eventual success would imply.
PayNow Already Works. Why Would Anyone Need Stablecoins?
Having spent years in the card and e-wallet businesses, Hang believes stablecoins could address a longstanding problem in payments.
While cards and QR codes allow consumers to complete transactions almost instantly, settling funds between financial institutions can take considerably longer, particularly across borders.
Hang argued that stablecoins could close that gap by allowing payment instructions and the transfer of value to happen together, provided both parties can transact directly in them.
He described the concept as “payment equal settlement” and went as far as predicting that stablecoins could gradually replace fiat currencies in a growing share of business and consumer payments.
Vincent, however, wasn’t entirely convinced that ordinary consumers would see the appeal.
Singaporeans already have PayNow, while Malaysians have DuitNow, both of which allow people to transfer money almost instantly.
With such convenient options available, why would anyone feel the need to switch to stablecoins?
Hang acknowledged that the argument was less compelling in countries where domestic payment systems already worked well.
He pointed instead to markets such as Argentina and Türkiye, where people concerned about local currency depreciation may prefer keeping some of their savings in dollar-backed stablecoins.
There’s also the practical matter of spending those holdings.
Hang believes making them easier to use for everyday purchases could encourage wider adoption, particularly among people already looking for alternatives to their local currencies.
DCS Wants to Make Stablecoins Easier to Spend
At DCS, Hang hopes to make stablecoins easier to spend, describing the company as a “Web 2.5” bridge connecting digital asset holders with merchants that already accept conventional payments.
The company already offers DeCard, a Visa card launched in May 2025, before Hang joined DCS.
It allows users to fund their spending with fiat currency or stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, with licensed service providers handling the conversion into fiat.
Someone holding stablecoins could therefore use DeCard at an ordinary retailer, which would process the purchase through the existing Visa network without needing to handle digital assets itself.
DCS supports QR-based and online payments as well, with Hang focusing particularly on consumer spending even as many other stablecoin companies concentrate on cross-border transactions between businesses.
He also wants DCS to provide payment infrastructure that Web3 companies can integrate into their platforms, allowing them to offer card and payment services without having to develop those capabilities themselves.
Hang was candid about the company’s current position.
“We are not the leading company in this industry yet,” he acknowledged.
He also recognised that regulatory compliance remains a challenge, particularly when it comes to keeping illicit funds out of conventional payment networks.
For DCS, the ambition is to become a shared payments infrastructure provider that Web3 businesses can rely on, allowing their customers to spend digital assets through payment methods merchants already accept.
Watch the full conversation on our YouTube channel.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore based on an image by Fintech News Network via YouTube.
