Tim Lee

Founder & CEO QFPay

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Tim Lee — recorded by his university as LEE Ying Ho Tim — founded and leads QFPay, a mobile payments company that grew up inside the Chinese QR-code payment boom and then exported that model outward. QFPay’s business is merchant acquiring and payment infrastructure: giving shops, restaurants and service businesses a single way to take the wallets their customers actually use, across mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and the UAE. The scale reported for the platform is substantial — over a million merchant partners and 200 million users across more than 300 cities — and it has been funded by Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners among others. Lee is a Chinese University of Hong Kong engineering graduate, and in 2017 CUHK gave him its Faculty of Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award for his contribution to mobile payment technology in China.

Career Highlights

• Founded QFPay, whose mainland Chinese business dates to 2011 and which now operates through QFPay Haojin Fintech Limited across China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and the UAE.
• Honoured with the Distinguished Alumni Award by CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering at its silver jubilee ceremony on 18 March 2017, one of 25 alumni recognised; the citation reads “Co-founder and CEO, QFPay”.
• Built the platform to a reported one million-plus merchant partners and 200 million users in more than 300 cities.
• Raised more than RMB 500 million for the company from investors including Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners.
• Named by Fast Company to “The 100 Most Creative Leaders in China” and by Fortune China to its “Top 40 Under 40”.
• Spoke at Business of Design Week in Hong Kong on 3 December 2020, in a session on the permanent changes to eCommerce.
• Worked at Hang Seng Bank and IBM and founded the mobile-internet venture Zmotion before QFPay, according to aggregator records that no named source corroborates.

Professional Journey

Lee’s career before QFPay is documented only thinly and only by aggregators: an account management role at Hang Seng Bank around 2006-2007, then roughly three years at IBM as a corporate business consultant, then a mobile-internet venture called Zmotion founded around 2010. That sequence — banking, then enterprise consulting, then a mobile startup — is the plausible run-up to a payments company, but it should be treated as reported rather than established.

QFPay’s mainland Chinese business dates to 2011, which is the founding year given by every profile of Lee, and its timing put it at the beginning of the Chinese shift from cards to QR-code wallets. The company’s role was infrastructural rather than consumer-facing: building the acquiring side so that merchants could accept the wallets that were rapidly becoming the default. That positioning attracted Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners, and total funding has been reported above RMB 500 million.

By 2017 the Chinese business was established enough that CUHK honoured Lee at its Faculty of Engineering silver jubilee, one of twenty-five alumni recognised, citing his contribution to the development of mobile payment technology in China. Fast Company and Fortune China had by then both listed him — the former among “The 100 Most Creative Leaders in China”, the latter in its “Top 40 Under 40”.

The second phase was international. QFPay’s Hong Kong entity, whose own About Us page dates the company to 2015, took the mainland playbook into markets where Chinese wallets mattered for inbound spending and where local wallets were fragmenting the same way: Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and the UAE. When Lee appeared at Business of Design Week in Hong Kong in December 2020 he was billed as Founder and CEO of QFPay Haojin Fintech Limited, speaking on how the pandemic’s eCommerce shifts would prove permanent.

That 2020 appearance is the most recent dated public statement of his role that this review could find. QFPay remains an operating company — its website was updated in September 2026 — but the company publishes no leadership page and names no executives, so his continued incumbency in 2026 is supported by business databases rather than by the company or by dated coverage. Nothing found suggests he has left; nothing found positively confirms he has not.

Education

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Engineering

CUHK’s Faculty of Engineering named him a Distinguished Alumnus in 2017, which establishes that he graduated from the faculty. Neither the university press release nor the faculty’s award listing names his department, degree or graduation year. A specific bachelor’s degree in Information Engineering is reported by business databases but is not corroborated by the university, and an executive programme at China Europe International Business School that appeared in an earlier version of this profile has been removed, executive education not being a degree.