“One particularly creative marketing example is a promotion that China’s successful
messaging app Tencent’s WeChat ran during the Chinese New Year holiday in 2014. To promote its WeChat Payment service, which allows peer-to-peer transfer and electronic bill payment, the company launched an app that allows users to send a specific amount of money to a certain number of friends, with the app randomly assigning the money.

“To redeem and see how much money you were sent, recipients had to sign up for a WeChat account. WeChat’s virtual envelopes went viral because they added an element of suspense to the tradition of giving gifts of money in red envelopes during the New Year. In two days, the company got 200 million of its existing and new users to link their bank cards to their account, a feat that took Alibaba’s Alipay eight years.”

For the full details see McKinsey & Company report, FinTechnicolor:The New Picture in Finance (PDF: 8.8mb)