W22 - Differences Between Consumer and Business

Introduce a consumer-side perspective to understand and summarize the particularities of the enterprise side; this is something to keep doing. By enumerating different facets for abstraction, we help the enterprise side be better perceived and understood, and enable more favorable long-term technical decisions at the right moments.

From the perspective of operational complexity, Mr. Tian’s remark last week was apt: “The consumer-side knife is payments; the enterprise-side knife is settlement.” Both ultimately aim for the same outcome — converting active traffic into active accounts — but their starting points differ: the consumer side begins with acquiring active payments, while the enterprise side begins with active settlement. In core mental models like “accounts,” “balances,” and “cards,” the enterprise side is stronger than the consumer side, which forms the basis for product forms such as “business ledgers,” “unified balances,” and “business cards.”

In terms of role classification, the enterprise side is more complex than the consumer side. Even without user stratification, roles alone cover multiple dimensions — KA and SMB, operators and practitioners, merchants and fulfillment agents, brand owners, service providers, suppliers, and more. The actual operator of an account might be the owner or merely the store cashier. Therefore many enterprise products have no counterpart on the consumer side and are harder to understand, such as service-fee disbursement for couriers or revenue sharing for service providers.

The supply side faces strong operational compliance requirements, and those requirements keep tightening. On the consumer side there is almost no concept of “consumption compliance.” By contrast, enterprise “operational compliance” is a multifaceted, complex system involving multiple regulators and covering dimensions like 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 aim to extract funds through the settlement chain; the most effective countermeasures are implemented along that chain.

There are also significant differences between consumer and enterprise in business scope and service composition. I believe much of this difference stems from organizational structure–driven complexity. For example, the current enterprise division into “core services” and “wallet” product teams means the wallet team’s responsibilities long ago exceeded what relates only to the wallet homepage’s traffic; within core services there are many product capabilities that have no consumer-side counterpart.

On the front-end layer, the most valuable and challenging work concentrates on containers and infrastructure. The long-term vision is to build a unified business integration SDK where all services run in a standard, dynamically enhanced container (EHC). EHC would provide multiple enhancement capabilities and smooth over differences between engines (such as KNB and Recce).