Popular online payment system Alipay, which is owned by Jack Ma’s Ant Group along with e-commerce giant Alibaba, was one of six Chinese apps to be blacklisted by former President Trump on 6 January last year. Alipay dominates the digital wallet market in China and overtook PayPal as the largest mobile payment platform in the world in 2014.
In March 2020, the finance app and its affiliate e-wallets claimed to have 1.3 billion annual users worldwide, but the former president hoped to reduce the American portion of that number significantly by signing an executive order to ban it on the basis that it poses a threat to “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States”. The order suggests that the app could gather “dossiers of personal information” from its users. The order came into effect 45 days after it was signed, which was nearly two months after the former president left office.