PayPay Corporation (“PayPay Co.”, “we”, “our” or “us”), a joint venture of SoftBank Group Corp., SoftBank Corp., and Yahoo Japan Corporation is launching a 1 day limited “PayPay Customer Appreciation Day” to celebrate its first anniversary on October 5, 2019.
“PayPay Customer Appreciation Day” is targeted to all users, merchants and stores (physical stores) offering 20% of the amount of payment made via PayPay (*1) as PayPay Bonus up to 1,000 yen. The campaign will run with the “Customer Appreciation Day Limited PayPay Chance” campaign which gives users chances to win a full cashback with a winning ratio of 1 out of 50 up to 100,000 yen.
According to the “Payments Japan Association” (*2), the 2016 cashless payment rate in Japan was 19.8% and indicated to be globally very low. In response to this, METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry), announced that this rate should be raised to 40% by 2025 and 80% in the future (*3).
This is because Japan has urgent issues to resolve such as reducing social costs (printing, transport, storefront equipment, ATM cost, labor cost etc.) that is estimated to be 8 trillion yen a year when keeping the commercial cash custom and improving productivity to deal with labor shortage due to the fall in population.
Our company was jointly established by SoftyBank Corp., and Yahoo Japan Corporation in June 2018 and the smartphone payment service “PayPay” started on October 5.
“Barcode Payment” adopted by “PayPay” is excellent as all you need to do to install smartphone payment, is to put up a printed “QR code” at storefronts. In addition, as a result of providing various services to build merchant network such as free system usage fee and bank transfer fee and next-day sales deposit, cashless reaching 1 million merchants on August 8, 2019.(*5) . We think that if it is easy for shops to install our system, it becomes a benefit to our users as they will be able to use PayPay “anywhere”. And this becomes the driving force of cashless payment in Japan.
In addition, we launched several campaigns one after another such as the “10 Million Yen Give-away Campaign”, “2nd 10 Million Yen Give-away Campaign”, “Always WakuWaku PayPay” giving great value to the consumers and as a result, the number of “PayPay” users reached to 10 million on August 7, 2019. (*5) . We believe that in order to promote cashless trends in Japan it is very important to create opportunities for consumers to feel the convenience of cashless payment through these campaigns, as well as having measures in expanding the number of merchants. Furthermore, we have been putting measures to provide a secure service so that users can feel at ease when using our service such as establishing measures for fraudulent usage, establishing a 24/7 service desk to provide assistance for inquiries and implementing a compensation system for damage from fraudulent usage.
PayPay will continue providing a convenient and safe smartphone payment environment for all kinds of shops, service providers and users striving for a world where people can shop cashless anywhere in Japan.
*1 Payments made with credit cards (other than Yahoo! Credit Card) are not eligible for the campaign.
*2 (Source) Payments Japan Association “Cashless Roadmap 2019” April 2019
*3 (Source) Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry “Cashless Vision” April 2018
*4 System usage fee will be free for the user scan type payment method (QR code scanned by users) until September 30, 2021 and the bank transfer fee will be free until June 30, 2020. Fees after these dates are to be determined. (Deposits to Japan Net Bank accounts are free forever).
*5 PayPay Corporation https://about.paypay.ne.jp/pr/20190808/01/ (Press Release)
