China is ranked first in the world in the growth of its bank card business, Chen Jing, head of the central bank's sci-tech department said earlier this week.

According to Chen Jing, the People's Bank of China, the central bank, is organizing work to hammer out China's financial IC (integrated circuit) card criteria, to normalize application of the banking smart cards.

The central bank official said that efforts will be made to further improve bank card services, intensify control over bank cards, and contain various smart-card-based frauds. Use of tax-controlled cashiers will be popularized in the nation, the official added.

By the end of June this year, China issued 714 million bank cards, involving 1.35 trillion yuan (US$162.7 billion) in RMB-denominated deposits outstanding and US$2.735 billion in deposits in foreign currencies, according to Chen Jing.

Between January and June, bankcard-based trade amounted to 12.14 trillion yuan (US$1.5 trillion) nationwide, a growth of 60.37 percent over the same period of last year, Chen Jing added.

According to statistics from China UnionPay Co., Ltd., which is devoted to the bank card networking business on the mainland, 141 card issuers, 370,000 POS (point of sales) machines and 62,000 ATM (automatic teller machine) had been hooked up to the company's bank card business network by the end of June. In the first half of this year, 830 million deals were made among different banks via the bank-card network, involving a transaction volume of 292.9billion yuan (US$35.3 billion), a year-on-year increase of62 percent and 94 percent respectively. 

Chen noted that the bank card market in China is still in its infancy, as credit cards claim just four percent of the market.

(Xinhua News Agency September 27, 2004)