《经济学人》2023年5月20日封面（社论）文章精翻：《全球支付系统的“三国”混战》（A fight among three）

A fight among three

“三国”混战

The fight over the future of global payments

全球支付的未来之争

Digital payments have transformed domestic finance. Now competition is going global

数字支付已经改变国内金融。现在，竞争正在走向全球

Over the past two decades, the ways people pay, receive and transfer money have changed beyond recognition. The revolution began in 2007 when M-PESA made it possible for Kenyans to make payments with a text message. In 2011, Alipay launched payment-by-QR-code in China, a system that has all but replaced cash in cities. Since then, India’s state-led Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Brazil’s Pix have vastly widened access to the financial system among the poor. As our special report explains, globally the use of notes and coins has been cut by a third, e-commerce has boomed and life without digital payments has become unimaginable.

在过去的二十年中，人们的付账、收钱和转账的方式已经发生了翻天覆地的变化。这场革命始于2007年，当时M-PESA（M代表移动，PESA是斯瓦希里语“货币”的意思，是一种基于手机的汇款、支付和小额融资服务，由沃达丰和肯尼亚最大的移动网络运营商Safaricom于2007年推出）使肯尼亚人可以通过短信付款。2011年，支付宝在中国推出了二维码支付系统，该系统几乎取代了城市中的现金。从那以后，印度国家主导的统一支付接口（Unified Payments Interface，UPI，是由印度国家支付公司（NPCI）开发的即时实时支付系统。就用户和交易数量而言，它被认为是世界上最成功的支付系统之一）和巴西的Pix极大地扩大了贫穷人口进入金融体系的机会。正如我们的特别报告所解释的那样，在全球范围内，纸币和硬币的使用量减少了三分之一，电子商务蓬勃发展，没有数字支付的生活已经变得不可想象。

《经济学人》2023年5月15日特别报道链接：支付系统的数字化，正在改变全球金融

(https://www.economist.com/special-report/2023/05/15/as-payments-systems-go-digital-they-are-changing-global-finance)

Having transformed how people use money at home, the race to transform payments is now going global. Cross-border retail spending (including tourism) and remittances will hit $5trn this year; business-to-business payments are worth eight times that. Three big players are duking it out to process these vast flows of funds. The West’s legacy system, including the Visa-Mastercard duopoly and SWIFT, a messaging system for bank payments, is the dominant incumbent. China is the most advanced challenger, with its payment apps, its card network, UnionPay, and CIPS, its more expansive alternative to SWIFT. In third place is India, whose ambition to deploy UPI globally has grown.

在改变了国内人们使用货币的方式之后，改变支付方式的竞赛现在正走向全球。今年跨境零售支出（含旅游）和汇款将达到5万亿美元；企业对企业的付款价值是其八倍。“三巨头”正在为处理这些庞大的资金流而展开角逐。西方的传统系统，包括威士-万事达（Visa-Mastercard）双头垄断和银行支付消息传递系统SWIFT（Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication），目前占主导地位。中国是最先进的挑战者，拥有其支付应用程序、卡网络、银联和CIPS（Cross-border Interbank Payment System，人民币跨境支付系统），CIPS是SWIFT的更为广泛的替代方案。排在第三位的是印度，其在全球部署UPI的雄心已经开始膨胀。

The competition among the three blocs is heating up fast. Alipay is now accepted by 2.5m merchants overseas. UnionPay, which is already the world’s largest card network by transaction volume, is accepted by 65m merchants globally, compared with Visa’s 100m. Most are outside China. India’s UPI has been linked with Singapore’s fast payment system, allowing consumers in both countries to pay in the other using their domestic platform. India is in talks with more than 30 other countries to export its payments kit, which would link their systems too. In November, four central banks, including China’s, successfully tested a cross-border system for settling transactions using central-bank digital currencies.

三大集团之间的竞争正在迅速升温。支付宝现在被海外250万商家接受。银联已经是全球交易量最大的卡网络，全球有6500万商户接受银联，而威士（Visa）也只不过才有1亿。以上大多数业务在中国境外。印度的UPI与新加坡的快速支付系统相关联，允许两国的消费者使用其国内平台向对方支付。印度正在与其他30多个国家进行谈判，以出口其支付工具包，该工具包也将连接到他们的系统。在11月，包括中国在内的四家央行成功测试了一个使用央行数字货币结算交易的跨境系统。

The Asian giants have several motives for spreading their wings. The most important is to become less dependent on the West. Russia’s card network, Mir, launched after Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, has limited the damage done by the withdrawal of Visa and Mastercard from Russia after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Volumes on CIPS have surged since 2020, helped by Russia being mostly cut out of SWIFT. But building a sanctions-workaround is not the only goal. Countries also crave for themselves the clout that comes with control over the world’s financial infrastructure, as well as seeking more convenience for their people when they transact internationally.

亚洲巨人“展开羽翼”有以下几个动机。最重要的是减少对西方的依赖。俄罗斯的卡网络Mir是在普京于2014年非法吞并克里米亚后推出的，降低了在全面入侵乌克兰后Visa和万事达卡从俄罗斯撤出所造成的损害。自2020年以来，CIPS的交易量激增，这得益于俄罗斯大部分被与SWIFT切断。但建立制裁变通办法并不是唯一的目标。各国还渴望控制世界金融基础设施所带来的影响力，以及在进行国际交易时为其人民寻求更多便利。

视频链接：《数字货币会导致银行破产吗？》（“Could digital currencies put banks out of business”）(https://youtu.be/fpb-qJv6dBs)

The West might fear a fragmentation of the global financial infrastructure that allows wrongdoers to escape future sanctions. Yet a more open landscape for global payments will benefit its consumers and businesses. Under competitive pressure SWIFT has already upgraded its once-clunky system and has nearly halved the cost of messaging. The average cost of a remittance has been cut by a third in the past decade partly because of new fintechs. The Western card networks are overdue a shake-up. The typical 1% cross-border fee they charge (on top of a 1-3% levy on merchants) supports company-wide net margins of around 50%, among the highest in the world for listed firms. The spread of Alipay, UPI and even other newcomers like GrabPay in South-East Asia or WhatsApp Pay, which just launched in Singapore and Brazil, will give consumers other options.

西方可能担心全球金融基础设施的碎片化，使不法分子能够逃脱未来的制裁。然而，一个更加开放的全球支付格局将有利于其消费者和企业。在竞争压力下，SWIFT已经升级了其曾经笨重的系统，并将消息传递成本降低了近一半。在过去十年中，汇款的平均成本降低了三分之一，部分原因是使用了新的金融科技。西方卡网络早就应该进行一次改组。他们收取的典型1%跨境费用（除了向商家征收1-3%的税费）支持全公司约50%的净利润率，在世界上上市公司中是最高的。支付宝、UPI甚至其它新来者（如东南亚的GrabPay或刚刚在新加坡和巴西推出的WhatsApp Pay）的普及将为消费者提供其它选择。

Domestic payments markets have tended to be winner-takes-most because people like using a big network with lots of other users. For cross-border payments, consumers and businesses will tend to favour the payments system they use in their respective home countries. Since it is increasingly easy for merchants to accept many different payment options, change seems likely. A system where people can use their domestic networks to pay abroad promises to be more convenient as well as cheaper.

国内支付市场往往是赢家通吃的，因为人们喜欢使用拥有大量其它用户的大型网络。对于跨境支付，消费者和企业更倾向于支持他们在各自国家使用的支付系统。由于商家越来越容易接受许多不同的付款方式，因此有可能会发生变化。如果某一系统能够让人们可以使用国内网络进行境外支付，那么，这个系统就有望变得更方便，也更便宜。

Diverse, not divided

要多元，不要分裂

The countries that benefit most will be those that stay open to all platforms and let them overlap, rather than forcing people to use national champions. And though the West will lose some power as a result of the proliferation of alternatives to its payments systems, it will maintain the ability to levy the most effective forms of sanctions: on flows of trade and technology. The digitisation of finance has already made billions of lives better. The new global race promises to enhance those gains.

受益最大的国家将是那些对所有平台保持开放并让它们重叠的国家，而不是强迫人们使用国家指导性金融机构。尽管西方将因其支付系统替代品的激增而丧失一些影响力，但它将保持实施最有效制裁形式的能力：（制裁）贸易和技术流动。金融数字化已经改善了数十亿人的生活。新的全球竞赛有望巩固这些成果。