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Bank cards pose challenge yet opportunity

By Ding Qi (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2008-08-08 16:54

China's bank card market has a long way to go as statistics showed more than 90 percent of cards have scarcely been used so far, the Shanghai Securi ties News reported on Friday.

As of the end of last year, lenders in China issued 1.5 billion bank cards, including debit cards, credit cards and quasi-credit cards. Of the huge sum, active cards, which were used at least once every month, were only about 80 million, less than 10 percent of the total.

These figures come from China UnionPay, the nation's leading bank card network operator. However, domestic banks have no universal standard for deciding whether a card is active or not.

The large number of dormant cards is partly due to payment habits of some domestic consumers, who prefer cash transactions instead of the "virtual numbers" on the cards, analysts said. Besides, to lift market shares, domestic banks issued a massive number of cards to take in as many clients as possible. Many cards were scarcely used after issuance.

Sleeping bank cards have become a universal phenomenon in the country, said professor Fan Lifu from Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, they can cause a waste of the nation’s financial resources and extra expenditure from users.

However, other experts think that the problem, if well managed, can turn into an opportunity.

Sleeping bank cards can be a problem, said Lin Caiyi, a senior researcher from UnionPay, however, the huge amount also means China’s banking card market has great potential.

According to Lin, since personal checks are not commonly used in China, cash and bank cards remain the two major payment tools. However, the average trading volume for each card in China accounted only for 14.3 percent of the world’s average. Moreover, markets of most second-tier cities and vast rural areas are still far from coverage by bank cards.

Lin believes the development of bank card technology and more promotion of card use will make more room to develop the bank card market.

During the past months, China's banking regulator has approved three foreign banks to issue yuan-denominated debit cards in the domestic market. Analysts believe more overseas lenders will become local card issuers as the country's financial sector becomes more globalized.