After the 500 million acquisition, you need to reconsider your payment platform!

Just yesterday, WorldFirst, a third-party payment platform well known to Amazon sellers, and Ant Financial, the parent company of Alipay, got together~

Since the end of last year, there have been rumors that Ant Financial intends to spend 500 million pounds to acquire WorldFirst , but both parties have denied it. In January this year, WorldFirst even withdrew its previous application for a payment license for a Chinese entity. At this time, everyone thought that WorldFirst had removed obstacles to its merger with Ant Financial, but in the end, the official denied it.

However, just yesterday on Valentine's Day, the two payment giants that had been entangled for a long time finally joined hands! Jonathan Quin, the founder and CEO of WorldFirst, also announced the good news to customers via email. This old payment institution headquartered in London, UK, has completed the change of ownership and became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ant Financial (the actual acquisition price has not yet been disclosed).

For us sellers, these two companies are definitely familiar. As a 15-year veteran of the third-party payment platform, WorldFirst has accompanied the rise of major cross-border e-commerce platforms almost throughout the process, providing foreign exchange and currency hedging services to companies, banks, asset management companies and individuals around the world. It is also almost becoming the first foreign company to obtain a Chinese payment license.

However, in an era when third-party payment platforms are emerging in large numbers, this old platform is obviously lacking in stamina. While everyone is using lower and lower fees and diversified services to attract sellers, WorldFirst is still insisting on its original high fees. By the time it realized what was happening, it was too late. The massive loss of customers could no longer be reversed . Marrying into Ant Financial, a wealthy family, is obviously a very good way out for WorldFirst.

On the other hand, Ant Financial, a financial giant with a valuation of over 100 billion US dollars, has become an unstoppable force in its globalization strategy. To date, the number of Alipay's global financial institution partners has increased to more than 250. The acquisition of WorldFirst has greatly advanced Ant Financial's globalization progress and filled the gap in Ant Financial's current cross-border 2B foreign exchange and currency hedging services , which is a good thing for both parties.

Although it is still a mystery what the future of WorldFirst will look like, and Alibaba has always had precedents of buying people who suffer, ofo, Xiami, and Meizu are all living examples. However, right now, WorldFirst still has an unfinished business that will really affect the sellers.

Before the acquisition was announced, and before everyone went home for the Chinese New Year, WorldFirst announced that it would shut down all its operations in the United States and package those businesses separately into a new website (Omega) to operate independently.

Although in theory it has no impact on Chinese sellers on the other side of the ocean, if you use reasonable Internet access software and end up using a US IP, you will not be able to log into WorldFirst's official website.

However, Chinese sellers using WorldFirst are now facing another problem. Compared with previous years, WorldFirst seems to require too much annual review information this time .

Many payment platforms used by Xiaofenshen will not require sellers to provide such detailed information, and there are many more items compared to the previous WorldFirst annual review information, which makes people think of the acquisition by Ant Financial.

After all, after the acquisition, the information of these sellers can naturally be easily obtained by Ant Financial. I boldly thought that these extra information could be collected by WorldFirst from the sellers at the instruction of Ant Financial? Thinking of this, I can't help but sigh that when the Amazon platform first rose, only WF was a relatively easy-to-use payment platform. Now the payment industry is flourishing, but WF was acquired by Ant Financial, and its future is unpredictable. It feels like seeing the collapse of Nokia.

I'll leave you with my thoughts here. With the high taxes and turbulence of WF, many sellers have to consider changing payment platforms. For sellers who are still waiting to choose a payment platform, good news is here! We have reached an agreement with iPayLinks, a dark horse platform in the payment industry, to give all our fans a preferential rate.

The collection fee is only 0.2%!!!

Where else can you find such a cheap rate? Of course, there is no need to worry about security behind the cheap rate. iPayLinks' payment qualifications are also very complete, from Hong Kong MSO to PCI-DSS Level-1 and other licenses.

PS. If you want to join the seller discussion group, you can also private message me to let me add you to the group