Alipay+, the global wallet gateway of Ant International, is officially entering the Georgian market. This marks a milestone partnership for the newly licensed Neo Georgian Bank, designating the integration of Alipay+’s payment ecosystem as the bank’s premier, large-scale banking-technology offering.
Yesterday, on the sidelines of the ongoing Tbilisi Financial Summit, the parties signed an agreement establishing Neo Georgian Bank as the exclusive partner for Alipay+ in Georgia. The bank will serve as a centralized technology and settlement hub for the country’s entire banking and financial sector.
The entry of Alipay+ creates unprecedented opportunities for Georgian businesses and consumers. As a global ecosystem, Alipay+ connects over 2 billion user accounts of over 50 international payment partners, and more than 150 million merchants worldwide. Its introduction fundamentally transforms the payments landscape by delivering:
- Direct Access to Fast-growing Asian Markets: Georgian companies and entrepreneurs gain direct access to receive cross-border payments from China, Southeast Asia, and across the globe without facing complex intermediary barriers.
- Significantly Lower Transaction Costs: Innovative QR-code payment infrastructure substantially reduces cross-border transaction fees and commissions for merchants and traveling consumers alike.
- Boost to Tourism Revenue: International visitors arriving in Georgia (particularly from the Asian region) can make seamless payments at local retail, dining, and hospitality venues using their familiar home-country mobile wallets and apps via simple QR code scans.
- Seamless Convenience for Georgian Travelers Abroad: Georgian travelers and business executives can pay effortlessly across Asia and throughout Alipay+’s global ecosystem, avoiding inflated conversion rates and excessive foreign transaction fees.
Kakha Kodua, CEO of Neo Georgian Bank:
“Bringing Alipay+ to Georgia and forging this partnership transcends the scope of a single bank — we are connecting Georgia’s entire financial system and national economy to the world’s largest payment network. This is our bank’s premier flagship technological product, providing Georgian businesses with direct, substantially more cost-effective access to consumers across Asia and global markets. Today, finance is no longer bounded by national borders; Georgia’s economy must stand at the intersection of global flows, and this agreement elevates our country to a strategic new height on the international financial map.”
Leiming Chen, Senior Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer, Ant International:
"Cross-border connectivity has become the growth engine of the digital economy, and no merchant is too small to power it. We started from a simple conviction: that people should be able to pay with the apps they already trust, wherever in the world they find themselves, and that businesses of every size should be able to reach customers far beyond their borders. In Neo Georgian Bank we have a partner with the ambition to match — a single national gateway through which Georgia's financial institutions can reach the world, and every merchant, from national retailers to the smallest family business, can serve it. And in time, this gateway will run both ways, giving Georgians the same convenience and confidence, wherever travel or trade takes them."
Project Implementation
The initiative encompasses the seamless integration of local banks into the centralized network, nationwide rollout of QR payment acceptance across Georgia, and full compatibility for Georgian cards and applications across the global Alipay+ network. Pending regulatory clearances and the successful conclusion of initial pilot testing, full operational deployment is slated for completion by the end of the second quarter of 2027.
