Chinese e-commerce portal Alibaba.com has signed a cooperation agreement with Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), entrusting the bank to provide escrow services for its payment accounts.
According to the agreement, ICBC will set up a special account for Alibaba's payment account service Alipay. Then all the capital flow from Alibaba's online transactions will go through this account.
If there is anything wrong, ICBC is entitled to freeze the account. ICBC will also present a detailed report to Alibaba each month about the account management.
At present, transactions on both Alibaba and Taobao are completed through Alipay, a third payment platform of Alibaba which has a flow of about CNY200 million fixed funds each day.
Is Alipay.com available to North America? I am from Canada and would like to use Alipay as a form of payment method for purchases from my suppliers in China.