This thread has prompted me to think about how/why Wechat and Alipay managed to achieve dominant positions wrt payment.
I am guessing that there are hundreds of payment specialist companies around the world that are almost on the same level technology wise. The thing is, to get merchants to take you seriously, adoption matters.
Wechat had already established itself as the default messaging app, which replaced sms for more than half of China.
Meanwhile, Alipay rose on the coat tails of taobao as ecommerce took hold in China.
In both cases, they were too big for merchants to ignore.