Displaying items by tag: credit cards

China's UnionPay can't beat them, so it might as well join them: The payments giant is entering a partnership with UK-based fintech Tribe Payments that will allow banks and fintechs to issue its credit cards in Europe from July. Facing intense competition from internet finance titans Alipay and WeChat Pay at home, UnionPay is keen to drum up new business abroad. What better way than to cooperate with a rising British fintech?

China's UnionPay is stepping up European expansion in a bid to capture business from Chinese outbound tourism and corporate travel. The Chinese payments giant has established a partnership with Barclay's, which processes almost half of the UK's credit and debit card transactions, that will allow 110,000 UK merchants to accept UnionPay beginning from the summer of 2019.

At the end of last month, another Chinese fintech company Samoyed Holding filed for $80 million IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. The company provides consumer finance services for the Chinese millennials. Its main business is the credit card balance transfer business, counting for 74.7% of its 2017 turnover.

On December 11^th, 2017, China Union Pay (CUP), together with over 30 commercial banks and payment institutions, launched a new version of its mobile payment APP, QuickPass (云闪付), starting a new battle in the mobile payment industry.

The Bank of Harbin was granted a license to set up its consumer finance company, Hayin, on September 19th. The bank owns 59% shares of Hayin’s equity with paid-in capital RMB295 million ($44 million). It is another consumer finance license which is issued by the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) to a company that has a banking background. 

Over the past year, China's National Development and Reform Commission had been defining and refining the new payment card merchant fees. These came into effect on September 6th. The requirements have a range of implications, and are impacting the industry already.

In January 2015, UnionPay Smart, a China UnionPay company specialized in business intelligence, customer profiling and online marketing, announced an agreement with Isobar China, a part of global Top-5 advertising conglomerate Dentsu Aegis. Together with Isobar China, UnionPay Smart will build a data management platform (DMP) targeting online advertising.

China's P2P industry, which is technically a shadow banking / lending channel, continued its explosive growth in 2014 as 1,200 new platforms launched and transaction volumes grew 2.39 times as compared to 2013. At the same time the number of platforms suffering serious problems was 275, up 260% from the year before.

The recent PBOC annual Payments Industry Overview report shows plenty of impressive data and the main message that comes through is that "everything is growing". However, not all growth is the same and the numbers for credit cards industry are especially interesting.

Personal credit ratings in China have never been a pretty subject. Without a centralized credit database accessible to all, getting accurate credit information has proved challenging for any company in China providing loan products. With Ant Financial, the financial arm of Alibaba, launching Sesame Credit, we felt it was worth taking a second look at what might be happening here.