250m use Alipay during holiday

More than 250 million people used Alibaba Group's online payment service Alipay to transfer money during China's seven-day national holidays last week, a 400 percent increase during the same period last year, Securities Times reported Thursday.

The transaction volume jumped by nearly 10 times compared with last year, Securities Times cited figures provided by Alipay Wednesday.

Nearly 80 percent of the money was transferred by people using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to their bank accounts, the newspaper reported.

Consumers could not transfer their money in bank branches or use online banks during the national holidays, because the People's Bank of China was upgrading its payment and money transfer system during that period.