CHINESE banks scrambled for credit card business and customers who need to make cross-border payments while travelling overseas as China is poised to become the world's biggest outbound travel market this year.
The number of Chinese traveling overseas will exceed that of the United States and Germany this year, according to an industry report released ahead of the Beijing International Tourism Expo next week.
Chinese tourists enjoyed shopping abroad because luxury goods are cheaper compared with prices in the domestic market. To meet their growing demand for cross-border payments, Chinese banks have issued a variety of multi-currency credit cards.
Given a surge in credit card frauds, Bank of China, the nation's top foreign exchange bank, recently issued the first multi-currency chip credit card in the country that complies with the international standard called EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa).
The chip cards are believed to be more secure than traditional magnetic stripe cards because they are much harder to clone. Under the EMV standard each transaction is "stamped" to prevent data from being fraudulently reused.
The magnetic stripe cards will gradually phase out and from 2015 Chinese lenders are only allowed to issue chip cards, according to the People's Bank of China, the Chinese central bank.
The multi-currency Visa credit card issued by Bank of China cannot be used domestically because it doesn't comply with the domestic payment network that uses the local standard known as PBOC 2.0.