The only nontraditional bank in Forrester’s Mobile Banking Functionality Benchmark, Alipay not only earned the best overall score of 67 but also scored highest in four of the seven categories in our benchmark: account and money management, transactional features, service features, and marketing and sales.

In the evaluation conducted in August 2015, the Chinese mobile banking services Forrester reviewed achieved an average score of 55 out of 100. While this is slightly better than banks in Singapore and the UK, many Chinese banks still lag behind their peers in Australia, Europe, and North America.

Forrester evaluated five of China’s largest retail banks — Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), Bank of China (BOC), China Construction Bank (CCB), China Merchants Bank (CMB), and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) — as well as Alipay. In addition to the 41 criteria Forrester uses to examine the Mobile Banking Functionality Benchmark, a local criterion for China, the WeChat public account, was added, as WeChat plays a huge part in people’s daily life.

Beating the services of all five traditional Chinese banks with many features that none of the others currently provide, Alipay’s mobile offering took the top spot in the ranking, followed by CMB and ICBC. All five traditional banks received their lowest score in the service features category.

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