How can I set up WeChat Pay as a foreigner from outside of mainland China?

Not sure if this is an official way to do it, but I will answer how I got my WeChat Pay to work.

As a foreigner, you don’t have a way to directly transfer funds into your WeChat account unless you have a way to open a China based bank account (usually requires having a job in China or a prety large minimum deposit).

1 .  Make sure that your WeChat wallet is active. You have to have some way to get RMB into your WeChat wallet, be it opening a Red Envelope in w WeChat group or having a friend/relative send you such a Red Envelope (keep in mind there is a limit of around 200RMB on sending each Red Envelope).

2.  Once you have an active wallet, you can use this to send out Red Packets without any further settings. However, if you want to use the WeChat Pay function (as in real life live payments at retailers, restaurants, etc), you need some more tweaking.

3. Under bank card settings, you want to select “Foreign Bank Card” or “Foreign Credit Card”, I forget the exact wording. In this, input your credit card that is authorized to use internationally. This may take several attempts before it works right. If it takes, it will ask you to select a 6-digit passcode, which is what needs to be inputted each time you try to make a transfer out of your WeChat Wallet via Pay.

4.  One this is working, again, ask your friend/family to send you RMB, but this time as a Transfer, which does not have the 200RMB limitation.

5. Once you have larger RMB, you may use this around China (and even some international locations) without even having your real life wallet.

Good Luck!!!!

Yes, it’s very difficult to sign up as a foreign company since you will need a lot of documentation. I’ve listed some of the documents that you will need below:

– Certificate of Incorporation

– Business Registration Certificate

– Annual Report (If Available)

– ID Card of Intended WeChat Operator/Admin (This should be someone who will be with the company long-term)

– Business Bank Account Number

– Letter from Bank

– Proof of Business Operation (Photos of the Shop/Screenshots of the Website)

– Company water bill or electricity bill or bank letter to prove the BR address

– Recent 3-month mobile phone bill of WeChat operator (The same person who provided the ID)

– Company shareholder information (this is to comply with the national KYC practice for anti- money-laundering)

As others have written, get yourself a Chinese SIM card/number is step 1. You will need that because the banks uses SMS to do authentication and authorization. Find some place to squat and build up a good relationship in China. I was hiding in an university lab doing some research and built a good relationship with the lab admin.

Next go to a bank in China (and this is important — Chinese banks operating outside of China are not really Chinese banks), setup a bank account and put some money in it. The forms will have to be filled in Chinese so take a Chinese friend if you can’t read/write Chinese. Not all banks will give foreigners an account and I needed a Chinese address 10+ years ago.

Now you can register a WeChat account and setup the payment functions by linking it to your bank account. You need your Chinese cellphone because your bank will send authentication codes for WeChat Pay to your cellphone.

I have had Western friends try to link their credit card to their WeChat Pay. Didn’t work 2 years ago. Maybe things has changed.