(Bloomberg)—PayPal Holdings Inc. said it’s joining with China UnionPay Co. in the digital-payments company’s latest global push to find more customers and better position itself in cross-border e-commerce.

Merchants in European countries will be able to accept payments from UnionPay credit and debit cards through PayPal’s Braintree platform designed for mobile commerce, San Jose, Calif.-based PayPal said Thursday in a statement. Adding a familiar payment option is a key step to enabling cross-border e-commerce, so the partnership will increase PayPal’s appeal to European merchants looking to reach Chinese shoppers. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. uses a similar strategy to introduce foreign goods to Chinese shoppers through its payments service, Alipay.

“To enable payments from the largest card network in China is quite material in terms of helping our merchants go connect with Chinese consumers,” Bill Ready, a PayPal senior vice president, said in an interview.

PayPal expects Chinese shoppers to spend $118 billion on cross-broader transactions this year, an increase of 31.4% from 2015.
Among Internet Retailer’s 2016 Top 1000 retailers, 461 accept PayPal. In the Internet Retailer 2016 Europe 500, 19 merchants list PayPal as their payment systems provider, including La Redoute SA (No. 55), Sony Corp. (No. 255) and Blue Nile Inc. (No. 366).