The Definition of Payment Service Relevant Market Under the Perspective of Antimonopoly

With the technological progress and development of payment requirements, payment services become more diversified. At present, China has basically established a multi-level payment service market, which has broken the monopolistic situation of banking payment services, gradually intensified competitions, and brought about challenges to antitrust enforcement agencies. In the face of payment service homogeneity, user lock-in effect and characteristics of bilateral market, the traditional definition of relevant market has been weakened and restricted. This article explores new paths to properly define payment service relevant market: in accordance with the business scope approved by financial supervision departments, we should reasonably define payment service market based on payment scale; meanwhile, pay attention to investigate payment service providers and rationally define the competitive market scope from a technical research and developmental perspective.