China to expand overseas bankcard deals and crack down frauds

Bank card business is developing rapidly in China. Su Ning, Vice President of the People's Bank of China, announced at the press conference on Tuesday that by the end of 2005, Chinese banks had issued 960 million bank cards. About 20 countries and regions around the world accept China UnionPay (CUP) bankcards.

It is learnt from the press conference that by the end of 2005, China had 175 issuers of bank cards. About 390,000 stores and merchants accept CUP cards. There are 610,000 POS machines and 80,000 ATM machines in China.

In 2005, the total bankcard transactions amounted to 4700 billion yuan, including 960 billion yuan of consumption transactions, which is 10.4 times and 8.5 times as much as that of 2000. Card consumption has become a fashion in China.

Excluding the wholesale and real estate transactions, the proportion of card payment consumption of the total retail sales of consumer goods increased from the 2.1% five years ago to nearly 10%. In Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other economically developed cities, the proportion had reached 30%, approaching the level of 30% to 50% of some developed countries.

In March 2002, China UnionPay Inc. was established, specializing in the construction and operation of the national integrated system of information exchange of bank cards and networking the national bank cards as a whole.

Over the past few years, the quality of the overall network has been substantially improved. The recorded success rate of local and trans-regional transaction increased from about 83% and 61% to nearly 97% and 95% in last year.

Starting from 2004, China UnionPay began to expand overseas market. So far there have been about 20 countries and regions accept CUP cards. The amount of annual overseas transaction hit around 13 billion yuan.

According to Su, China expects 60% of the stores with annual turnover over one million yuan and 25% of those with turnover less than one million yuan to accept CUP bank cards by 2008. Around 30% of the transactions in large and medium cities and 10% of the transactions in medium and small cities are expected to be settled via bank cards.

Meanwhile, China UnionPay will further expand the business to all the prefecture-level (and higher) cities and economically developed county-level cities and will raise the success rate of the inter-bank card transactions to over 96% by 2008.

On April 25, the People's Bank of China, National Development and Reform Commission, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Information Industry, Ministry of Commerce, the State Administration of Taxation, China Banking Regulatory Commission, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange jointly held the national bankcards working conference. The meeting called for policies in accordance with foreign exchange management policies to facilitate the use of CUP cards on the overseas market.กกกก

Public Security Minister assistant Zheng Shaodong introduced in the meeting that in 2005, Chinese police placed a total of 1,835 credit card fraud cases on file for investigation and prosecution, basically at the same level with that of the previous year. In terms of the amount, these cases involved 66.97 million yuan, down by 7.86%.

Zheng revealed that Guangdong police cracked down the largest cross-border forgery case of international credit card in February, rooting up three producing dens, arresting four major suspects in Hong Kong and the mainland, and seized 42,000 counterfeit international credit cards.กกกก

From March 2005, a series of fraud cases through handsets short messages almost involved all the Chinese provinces. According to incomplete statistics, tens of millions of mobile phone users received fraud short messages sent on behalf of China UnionPay. Thousands of cardholders were taken in and the total loss exceeded 10 million yuan.The case occurred mainly in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Fujian, Sichuan and other economically developed and populous areas.

Zheng said that China will continue to fight against bank cards crimes intensively and organize nationwide campaigns against bank card crimes so as to resolutely restrain the incidence of such cases.

The Ministry of Public Security, together with China's relevant departments, will set up the investigating and reporting system for suspicious bank cards transactions, enhance the security awareness of financial institutions and cardholders, and create concerted efforts on prevention and combating bank cards crimes in the whole society.

By People's Daily Online