TikTok in-app payment may come soon as ByteDance has applied for a new e-payment trademark in China

The trend of e-payment has increased quite dramatically in the past couple of years. Various apps integrate this system and provide different services including cash transfers, cashback, online payments, etc.

TikTok in-app payment may come soon as ByteDance has applied for a new e-payment trademark in China

Now, it seems that TikTok is the next app to finally planning to introduce its own payment system, as its parent company ByteDance has recently applied for a new e-payment trademark under TikTok’s name in China, as reported by GizmoChina and Mashdigi.

The sources have reported that this trademark has an international classification, and it covers around 36 categories of ‘Financial Property Management.’ ByteDance is waiting for the approval of this trademark.

In September 2020, ByteDance acquired UIPay which is a Chinese third-party payment service. This move was to make ByteDance capable of using these services for its own domestic payments.

This acquisition helped the company to get a payment license in China. UIPay itself was established in 2012 and received its third-party payment license from the Central bank of China in 2014.

ByteDance not only leveraged UIPay, but it also obtained three more payment licenses in June 2020 by various acquisitions and some other ways.

So, all of this shows that ByteDance was already thinking about introducing an e-payment method for its various services, and now it is extending it to TikTok, one of the company’s ‘gold egg-laying hen.’

ByteDance has grown so much because of the massive popularity of its short-form video-sharing app, TikTok. The past few years have been quite tough for TikTok as it faced numerous allegations of lenient content moderation policies to various other transparency and privacy issues.

The app had a major tussle with India and America during the whole of 2020. India has banned the app because of its political tensions with China. And Donald Trump’s administration also left no stone unturned to make it extremely difficult for TikTok to survive based on allegations citing TikTok to be snooping and intrusively collecting the data of American users.

Due to TikTok’s affiliation with China, the US government cited it as a major threat to national security. Donald Trump then launched into a series of ultimatums and threats of a ban on TikTok in the US with the condition that ByteDance had to sell off its US operations to a US investor.

This whole situation led the Chinese government to tighten their reins around the US-China tech trade, which was already strained.

The situation is not better even now when 2020 has ended, but surprisingly, amidst all this chaos, instead of losing popularity, TikTok’s growth spiked drastically and it has now become one of the most downloaded app globally and best-rated apps in the US.

With the upcoming TikTok e-payment option, this popularity and usage shall surely increase!

Originally published at Digital information world