Listed payment institutions have submitted their semi-annual performance reports for 2025. According to incomplete statistics, eight payment institutions including LaKaLa, YEAHKA, LIANLIAN, Guotong Xingyi, Jialian Payment, Haikefusion, Helibao, and Suixingfu have disclosed their operational performance for the first half of 2025. Among these, LaKaLa is listed on the A-share market, YEAHKA and LIANLIAN are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, while the remaining institutions operate as business segments under listed companies.
Since 2025, "internal competition" remains an unavoidable topic in the third-party payment industry. Under fierce competition in the domestic stock market, transaction volume growth has hit bottlenecks, and institutional profit margins have been compressed. This is reflected in performance data: the eight payment institutions generated cumulative revenue of approximately 9.268 billion yuan in the first half, with three institutions achieving year-on-year growth in both revenue and net profit, while the remaining five experienced revenue declines to varying degrees. In contrast, cross-border business maintained consistent expansion, and the overseas track is gradually becoming crowded.
**Five Institutions Report Revenue Decline**
Performance differentiation among institutions is evident. YEAHKA, LIANLIAN, and Guotong Xingyi achieved double growth in both revenue and net profit. YEAHKA reported revenue of 1.642 billion yuan, up 4% year-on-year, with period profit of 41.37 million yuan, up 27%. Guotong Xingyi reported revenue and net profit of 1.412 billion yuan and 318 million yuan respectively, growing 9.1% and 21.4% year-on-year.
LIANLIAN showed significant increases in both metrics. First-half revenue reached 783 million yuan, up 26.8% year-on-year. Compared to a loss of 350 million yuan in the same period last year, period profit surged 531.9% to 1.511 billion yuan in the first half of 2025. LIANLIAN noted in its financial report that net profit growth was primarily driven by an 85% year-on-year increase in operating profit to 63 million yuan, plus nearly 1.6 billion yuan in equity disposal gains from Lianton Company.
LaKaLa maintains its leading position in industry revenue scale but experienced year-on-year decline. Its revenue and net profit were 2.65 billion yuan and 230 million yuan respectively, down 11.1% and 45.3% year-on-year.
Jialian Payment also experienced a "double decline," with revenue of 949 million yuan, down 12.9% year-on-year, and net profit of 88.5 million yuan, down 65.6%. Suixingfu's parent company Gaoyang Technology's semi-annual report showed its payment and digitization services segment revenue of 801 million Hong Kong dollars, down 10% year-on-year, with losses of 83.33 million Hong Kong dollars.
Additionally, Haikefusion reported revenue of 725 million yuan with losses of 95 million yuan, representing 37 million yuan less in losses compared to the same period last year. Helibao's first-half revenue fell 40% year-on-year to 374 million yuan.
Overall, the mixed performance results reflect different operational focuses among listed payment institutions and the various challenges they face. China Postal Savings Bank researcher Lou Feipeng analyzed that this differentiation mainly stems from the evolution of industry competitive landscape, with some companies adopting price wars or strategic investments to compete for market share, leading to declining gross margins, while others increased investment in technology, which may drag down net profit in the short term but help enhance long-term competitiveness.
"Companies with revenue or profit growth remain a minority, superficially benefiting from refined cost control, short-term gains from non-core asset disposal, or growth from fee rate increases. This also indicates that the payment industry is a fundamental industry with large transaction volumes and rigid demand from merchants and users," said Wang Pengbo, Chief Analyst at Botong Consulting. He further explained that the core reason for declining performance is the saturation of the domestic payment market. After cash-out schemes were strictly regulated, institutions transformed toward serving "real merchants," intensifying merchant competition and triggering price wars that continuously compressed fee rates. Combined with insufficient merchant activity and weak consumption recovery, transaction volume growth has stagnated. Meanwhile, increased compliance and risk control investments, along with rising labor and technical maintenance costs, have further eroded already thin profit margins.
**Overall Decline in Acquiring Volume**
Semi-annual reports reveal that overall decline in acquiring volume has become a major reason for poor revenue performance among some institutions. LaKaLa's payment transaction amount in the first half was 1.96 trillion yuan, down 9.2% year-on-year, including bank card transaction amount of 1.3 trillion yuan, down 12.2%, and QR code transaction amount of 660 billion yuan, down 2.6%.
Jialian Payment's parent company Xinguodu similarly indicated that year-on-year net profit decline was mainly due to decreased revenue and gross margins in acquiring and value-added businesses. The performance of acquiring and value-added businesses was primarily affected by strategies related to expanding new merchants, with the company enhancing marketing support and adopting more competitive market measures, putting short-term profitability under pressure. Additionally, to advance global layout and long-term capability building, the company continued to increase resource investment in innovative areas such as cross-border payments and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, with the continued advancement of internationalization strategy, the company's overseas electronic payment equipment business revenue showed growth momentum.
However, some institutions maintained transaction volume growth. LIANLIAN's domestic payment business total payment volume (TPV) reached 1.9 trillion yuan, up 27.6% year-on-year, with domestic payment business total revenue of 211 million yuan, up 24.6% year-on-year. Guotong Xingyi achieved cumulative payment service transaction volume of approximately 1.05 trillion yuan in the first half, showing quarterly sequential improvement since the third quarter of last year, with QR code transaction volume and amount rising rapidly, up over 63% and 38% respectively compared to the same period last year.
Behind this may be the "contribution" of increased marketing investment and improved customer acquisition capabilities. Guotong Xingyi's parent company Newland mentioned in its semi-annual report that in merchant development, the company enhanced customer acquisition capabilities in key regions and industries, successfully breaking through multiple large industry clients, chain brands, and regional benchmark merchants, with the proportion of merchants with monthly transaction volume exceeding 500,000 yuan increasing nearly 8 percentage points compared to the end of 2024.
Despite mixed results, due to declining acquiring gross margins, generally speaking, the profitability efficiency dilemma faced by many listed payment institutions under domestic payment business "internal competition" and homogeneous competition still exists. In response, many payment institutions are making breakthroughs around "Payment + SaaS" and "Payment + AI," seeking more "second growth curves." Meanwhile, some AI-related generative content and intelligent agent tools are gradually becoming tools for payment institutions to improve merchant service quality.
For example, LaKaLa stated that the company injected AI large models into merchant service platforms, becoming the first in the industry to launch merchant AI wallets, reconstructing merchant service models and delivery methods, upgrading high-frequency services such as bill inquiry, equipment Q&A, personalized settlement, and store opening assistance to AI intelligent agents, delivering optimal solutions to users through the shortest path, creating a continuously learning, dynamically evolving store operation "super brain" for merchants.
Su Xiaorui, Senior Researcher at Suxi Intelligence Research, pointed out that each payment institution's deep exploration of vertical scenarios has become a trend. Through the creation of "Payment+" solutions and the extraction of SaaS merchant operation scenario characteristics, they mine comprehensive merchant value, focus on key retail ecosystems and consumer needs, and directly provide operational empowerment for merchants.
"In the future process of industrial digitization, payment institutions will accelerate transformation toward comprehensive payment + finance + technology services, relying on blockchain, AI and other technologies to reshape the industry landscape, gradually building an open, collaborative, secure and efficient new payment service system," said Rendong Holdings, Helibao's parent company, in its semi-annual report.
**Rapid Growth in Cross-border Business**
Compared to the uneven domestic payment business, most payment institutions' cross-border business showed good development trends. For example, LaKaLa served over 160,000 customers in the first half, up 70.4% year-on-year, with cross-border payment transaction amount of 37.1 billion yuan, up 73.5% year-on-year. In the first half, Xinguodu's cross-border payment business merchant count and transaction amount grew rapidly, with the second quarter showing 169% and 272% sequential growth compared to the first quarter respectively. Helibao's cross-border payment business transaction volume was approximately 82.5 billion yuan, up about 159% year-on-year.
In terms of license layout, Newland established subsidiaries in Hong Kong and the United States - Hong Kong Xingyi Payment Company and NovaPay, successfully obtaining MSB licenses and preparing MSO license applications. YEAHKA, after successfully obtaining the US MSB federal payment license, smoothly obtained the Arizona MTL state-level payment license.
As a listed company with cross-border payments as its main business, LIANLIAN's global payment business total payment transaction amount reached 198.5 billion yuan, up 94% year-on-year, with global payment business total revenue of 470 million yuan, up 27% year-on-year. Discussing its main experience, LIANLIAN CFO Wei Ping told reporters that LIANLIAN continuously expands the service boundaries of global payment business, gradually focusing expansion from original B2C business (mainly serving cross-border platform e-commerce) to B2B and service trade business. In global market ecosystem expansion, the company is actively exploring incremental market space in Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Latin America while deepening business penetration in core European and American regions.
Under the backdrop of policy support and encouragement and increasingly deepening global economy, payment overseas expansion has become a new path for listed payment companies to seek diversified business growth drivers. On one hand, cross-border payment rates are much higher than domestic rates, bringing huge profit potential. On the other hand, driven by domestic growth bottlenecks and attracted by rising digital payment demand in emerging markets such as Southeast Asia, Middle East, and Africa, overseas expansion enthusiasm remains high.
Gaoyang Technology's semi-annual report also mentioned overseas opportunities brought by stablecoins. "Stablecoin applications are gradually demonstrating revolutionary potential in the cross-border payment field. With the implementation of regulatory frameworks in major global markets, we are combining our customer scenarios and technical advantages to increase research and investment in this field, attempting to complement traditional payment systems and effectively build more comprehensive, efficient, and secure payment service infrastructure."
However, it's worth noting that most listed payment institutions' overseas business volumes are not large, and they face challenges such as regulatory differences across countries, localization operation difficulties, and compliance risks during overseas expansion.
Xinguodu pointed out that first, overseas local team building challenges are significant, with team integration and localization operation efficiency improvement requiring long cycles. Second, foreign local compliance and regulatory requirements are complex and variable, with different countries having varying laws and regulations in data security, privacy protection, anti-monopoly, and industry access, and frequent policy adjustments in some regions. Additionally, overseas business involves multiple links including supply chain coordination, cross-border capital flows, and localization adaptation of technology and services, making efficient resource coordination and optimal allocation a key issue affecting overseas business advancement efficiency.
"The largest cross-border export e-commerce market in cross-border payments has been occupied by leading institutions, with merchants forming usage stickiness. Payment institutions seeking overseas expansion still need time for compliance accumulation, such as licensing. Developing new markets is more challenging. Despite huge overseas business potential, it may be difficult to become a universal new growth point in the short term," Wang Pengbo admitted.
Su Xiaorui similarly emphasized that for institutions newly entering the track, there are significant gaps compared to established institutions that have been deeply cultivating in the track for a long time and hold more license resources. They still need continued exploration in license resource accumulation, operational routes, market selection, and merchant development.