Apple will launch its Apple Pay mobile payment service in China tomorrow at 5am local time. The news was revealed on WeChat by an executive from Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), who named tomorrow as the date when the bank would start accepting Apple Pay.

China is the fifth country to get Apple Pay. It’s already available in the UK, US, Canada and Australia, but Apple, which is launching in the country in partnership with China Union Pay, will face stiff competition in its newest territory, where mobile payments are already well established.

Figures from the China Internet Network Information Center suggest that more than 350m people had made a payment on mobile by the end of last year. The market is dominated by internet giants TenCent, which operates WeChat Payment, and Alibaba Group which operates Alipay through its finance division, Ant Financial Services Group.

Dr. Pinar Ozcan, associate professor of strategic management at Warwick Business School, says adoption of Apple Pay in China will depend largely on the alliances Apple builds, particularly with financial institutions. “As always, a force to consider in China is Alibaba, the giant conglomerate with more than 400m Chinese consumers so far invested largely on QR codes and more recently on selfie-payments,” he says. “Rather than a battle between Apple and its competitors in NFC (Near Field Communication) payments, such as Google Wallet, it seems to me that the battle in China might be between Apple and local competitors like Alibaba and Tencent over the actual payment technology.

“In the US, Apple Pay’s fingerprint-identification system and the storage of consumers’ secure payment details on the phone itself rather than the cloud, give Apple Pay great advantages, at least in terms of security as perceived by consumers. It seems that this will be critical in China as well.

“According to a recent survey by Deloitte, around 70% of Chinese expressed willingness to use mobile payments. However, this and other surveys also reveal that a large proportion of Chinese consumers have concerns about the security of mobile payment services. This is a clear advantage for Apple as the company is known for its meticulous attention to security, also proven in other industries before like in the case of the MP4 technology that revolutionised the music industry.”