W22 - Differences Between C and B

Introduce a consumer-side perspective to understand and summarize the particularities of the enterprise side; this is an ongoing effort. By enumerating different facets and abstracting them, we help the enterprise side become better recognized and understood, and enable technology decisions that favor long-term development at the right moments.

From the perspective of intrinsic operational complexity, a comment from Boss Tian last week was apt: “The consumer-side knife is payments; the enterprise-side knife is settlement.” Both ultimately aim for the same outcome—turning traffic activity into account activity—but their starting points differ: the consumer side begins with acquiring active transactions, while the enterprise side begins with settlement activity. In key mental models such as “ledger,” “balance,” and “card,” the enterprise side is stronger than the consumer side, which forms the basis for product forms like “business ledger,” “unified balance,” and “business card.”

In terms of role classification, the enterprise side is more complex than the consumer side. Even without introducing user tiers, roles alone already span many dimensions: KAs and SMBs, operators and practitioners, merchants and fulfillers, brand owners, service providers, suppliers, and more. The actual operator of an account might be the owner or merely the cashier in a store. As a result, many enterprise products have no counterpart on the consumer side and are therefore harder to understand—for example, fee disbursement services for riders or revenue-splitting for service providers.

The supply side faces strong operational compliance requirements, and those requirements are steadily increasing. On the consumer side, “operational compliance” is almost never a consideration and the concept is often absent. On the enterprise side, however, “operational compliance” is a multifaceted, complex system involving multiple regulators and dimensions such as qualification compliance, payment account compliance, and tax compliance. Although the consumer side also encounters cases related to payment account compliance and anti-money laundering, these are not central to daily work. After all, most fraud or money-laundering schemes ultimately aim to extract funds through the settlement chain, and effective countermeasures must focus on that chain.

There are also substantial differences between consumer and enterprise sides in business scope and service composition. I believe much of this difference stems from organizational structure–driven complexity. For example, the current enterprise-side split into “core services” and a “wallet” product team has led the wallet team’s responsibilities to extend far beyond what the wallet home screen traffic implies, while the core services team contains many capabilities that have no consumer-side equivalent.

At the frontend level, the most valuable—and most challenging—work centers on containers and infrastructure. The long-term plan is to build a unified business integration SDK so all services run inside a standard, dynamically enhanced container (EHC). EHC will provide multiple enhancement capabilities and smooth over differences between various engines (such as KNB and Recce).