JP Morgan has been quietly working with TikTok parent ByteDance on payments technology, Forbes reported on Jan. 5.

ByteDance enlisted JP Morgan to streamline transactions, improve the way payments are sent and received and set up one centralized bank account for ByteDance’s more than a dozen products, including TikTok and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, said the report.

The two parties have not made their collaboration public, but a case study posted on JPMorgan's website describes what has been done so far on the partnership.

The US banking giant said it has built “a real-time payments infrastructure” for ByteDance that now allows its users “to be paid instantaneously and directly into their bank accounts at any day or time.”  

The JP Morgan technology, enabled in the US and Europe, now “covers approximately one-fifth of TikTok’s 1 billion active users worldwide.”

It also “allows real-time exchange of data between ByteDance and JP Morgan” so that ByteDance can “see and monitor payments,” the case study showed.

TikTok, the viral short video app owned by ByteDance, processes a very large number of transactions each year, and the figure is expanding at a rapid rate. According to data analysis company Sensor Tower, global users spent $3.4 billion on TikTok in 2022, up from $2 billion in the previous year, with spending in the U.S. alone more than tripling from the previous year to $670 million.

The app has more than a billion users around the world and in the US was downloaded almost 60 million times last year, per Sensor Tower. 

The partnership with JPMorgan is just one part of ByteDance's fintech ambitions. Currently, the social media upstart is actively hiring for its global payments team, which focuses on building a platform to provide cross-border payment solutions for all of its products and services, including TikTok.

The team is led by Kingsley Lam, a former JP Morgan executive who left the bank in 2020 to manage international payments for TikTok and ByteDance in the Americas and Europe.