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By Xie Fang

Chinese Internet giant Tencent recently started to test its new wealth management product on its flagship social media platform WeChat in a bid to integrate its online payment strength and wealth management services for its over 1 billion users, the Shanghai-based China Business Network reported Sunday night.

The new product named Mini Fund,or “Ling Qian Tong” in Chinese, is designed to help WeChat users invest the usually under-utilized balance of their mobile payment accounts in various money market funds for a reasonable return.

The point of the product is to connect WeChat’s mobile payment capability to its wealth management function so that users can easily spend or invest their account balance at will.

The product is also seen by the public as a replica of Alipay, China’s most popular payment application developed by the country’s e-commerce giant Alibaba, Tencent’s archrival in China’s mobile payment industry.

Compared with the average annualized return rate of around 2.5 percent of the money market fund products offered by Alipay, the money market funds appearing in Mini Fund can yield an average return rate of roughly 3 percent, giving Tencent a leg-up in its competition with Alibaba.

At present, there are a total of nine money market fund products to be sold on Mini Fund, with their annualized return rates ranging from 3.02 percent to 3.27 percent.

With the growing prevalence of mobile payment technology in China in recent years, the size of Chinese consumers’ payment account balance is also expanding rapidly.

Data shows that so far, there is as much as 1.7 trillion yuan (245 billion U.S. dollars) resting in the accounts of the country’s mobile payment apps, with as high as 87.4 percent of which remaining idle.