ALL non-financial institutions must seek central bank approval to run third-party payment services as it beefs up efforts to control risks in the sector, the People's Bank of China said in a statement yesterday.

Companies, including Taobao's Alipay, must gain the business license from the PBOC by August 31 next year, the statement said. Failure to do so will see the services shut down, it added.

Other online payment platforms include Tencent's Tenpay and 99Bill, but Alipay has the biggest market share.

"We will start applying for the permit in the near future and strictly abide by its regulations," Zhu Jian, an employee with the marketing division of Alipay, said yesterday.

"Risk control and stricter regulations will benefit the whole online payment industry," he added.

Companies seeking to run third-party payment platforms nationally should have a registered capital of not less than 100 million yuan (US$14.6 million) while those which operate provincial platforms should have not less than 30 million yuan in registered capital.

They also have to be profitable for more than two years and have been providing information technology services for e-commerce companies for the same length of time till the day they apply for the services.

The country's online payment market totaled US$212.1 billion yuan in the first quarter of this year, a 93.5 percent jump from that of last year, according to Beijing-based iResearch Inc.