Is Alipay a competitor to Ripple?

Is Alipay a competitor to Ripple?

Recently, Alipay announced that it is launching a product for money transfers using blockchain technology. The technology boasts of transfers in a matter of seconds & also enables micro-transactions similar to XRP.

There was lots of speculation in the XRP community that Alipay had partnered with Ripple and were using XRP for their cross border transactions. Those speculations however were laid to rest with Alipay announcing that this was a joint venture with GCash and Standard Chartered bank.

Not many would've heard of GCash- they are a blockchain company and boast of a similar product like Ripple's XCurrent, which allows them to conduct transactions in few seconds. Standard Chartered is also a part of this deal. A surprising thing to note is that Standard Chartered has been one of the early supporters of Ripple.