PayPal taps wallets from China and India to make cross-border payments easier for 2 billion people

PayPal announced Wednesday it has partnered with global wallet companies to create a platform called PayPal World that is designed to make cross-border commerce easier. The platform will allow users to pay others using their local wallets and payment systems.

The company said the launch partners include India’s NPCI International Payments Limited, which operates mobile payments framework UPI (Unified Payment Interface), China’s Tenpay Global (Tencent’s Payment arm), which operates Weixin (WeChat) payment ecosystem in the country, along with PayPal and Venmo.

The company has also signed an memorandum of understanding with Latin America’s Mercado Pago, a fintech company that enables card and mobile payments, while the final details of the deals are being ironed out.

With these partnerships, PayPal wants to cover more than two billion users across the world.

“PayPal World is a first-of-its-kind payments ecosystem that will bring together many of the world’s largest payment systems and digital wallets on a single platform,” Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal said in a statement.

“The challenge of moving money across borders is incredibly complex, and yet this platform will make it so simple for nearly two billion consumers and businesses. We believe the changes we are announcing today have the potential to be a real game changer over time.”

The fintech company said that through PayPal World, PayPal and Venmo users will be able to send money to anyone in the world, even if they aren’t a PayPal user. For instance, when they are traveling in China, they can use PayPal on the Wexin payment network to pay to local businesses. On the flip side, if a customer from India is buying from a site in the U.S., they can use PayPal to check out and pay through their UPI wallet.

Total user base and transaction volume of these wallet systems are massive. For instance, Mercado Pago’s total payment volume was $58.3 billion in the first quarter of 2025. In India, UPI transactions hit more than $238 billion just for the month of June, according to NPCI data.

China’s Tenpay is also working on creating a better remittance framework along with enabling cross-border peer-to-peer payments.

“We are glad that Tenpay Global, Tencent’s cross-border payment platform, will support users of PayPal and Venmo in making payments by scanning Weixin Pay¹ QR codes, further expanding access for global digital wallets to transact in the mainland of China. In addition to payments, Tenpay Global will deepen its collaboration with PayPal World in remittances,” Wenhui Yang, CEO of Tenpay Global, said.

PayPal World is set to kick off the platform this fall with its launch partners. The company said that in 2026, Venmo users will be able to pay for shopping both online and offline for merchants that support PayPal’s payments.