Dive Brief:

• PayPal and Chinese bank card partner UnionPay are using PayPal's Braintree platform to enable merchants in European countries to accept payments from UnionPay credit and debit cards in China, Bloomberg reports.
• "With just a few lines of code, merchants can quickly integrate both UnionPay credit and debit cards into their checkout process," a Braintree blog post states. "Accepting UnionPay card consists of an easy one-time enrollment, and from then on, the experience is seamless."
• The announcement comes more than a year after PayPal teamed up with UnionPay to support the former's China Connect service.

Dive Insight:

Forgive us if we have been a little bit too obsessed with Alibaba's Alipay and every move that payments juggernaut has made as it seeks wider global acceptance. The Chinese market is of course a very big place, and bank and card issuer UnionPay deserves some attention, too.

UnionPay, like Alipay, also could be capable of granting merchants outside China access to Chinese spenders. UnionPay itself is looking to grow worldwide, and apparently has been doing a fine job of expanding, as it has been called the fastest growing bank card in the world. It has done so fairly quietly, though not long ago UnionPay did forge an interesting partnership with Swatch to enable payments through smart watches.

That makes UnionPay an important and hefty partner for PayPal, although PayPal already knows this, as it has been working with UnionPay since early 2015 to support PayPal's China Connect service.

PayPal has said in the past that cross-border commerce represents a a quarter of its business, and China is the world's biggest engine of cross-border e-commerce growth. Now, PayPal's Braintree platform is providing a simple way for merchants to get in on that lucrative game.