OREANDA-NEWS. March 18, 2013. Nowadays, the continuous innovation in bank card payment let more people prefer bank cards to cash in payment for consumption. During this year's Spring Festival Holiday (from Spring Festival's Eve until the fifteenth day of the lunar New Year), the total amount which has been paid by customers using ICBC bank cards reached RMB 113.5 billion, a surge of 51% year-on-year.

As more urban folks were going out for shopping, travelling, and dinning during the Spring Festival Holiday, ICBC provided innovative payment alternatives and managed to make innovative products and better services more available to cardholders. An example is the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Railway chip credit card. During the Spring Festival Holiday, passengers traveling between Guangzhou and Shenzhen by train now find it very fast and convenient to buy train tickets. Instead of queuing up at the packed ticketing hall, all it needs is to "clap" the small card at the tollgate, buy and pay the ticket and get on the train.

Meanwhile, as the Western Valentine's Day happened to fall on one day during this year's Spring Festival Holiday, ICBC branches across the country continued to organize fabulous promotion activities for holders of “Cool Pass” Card, such as "One Yuan Cool Pass", "Super Discount", "10 Yuan Movie", adding sweetness and happiness to the romantic holiday. With an embedded chip, ICBC “Cool Pass” Card is a UnionPay supplementary card of RMB credit card for fast, contactless payment. Through these promotions, customers enjoyed real discounts as they were more willing to use ICBC “Cool Pass” Card for payments.

Data showed that in 2012, the total amount paid with ICBC bank cards exceeded RMB 4 trillion, up 30% from a year ago to RMB 4.13 trillion. In terms of cardholder expenditure volume, ICBC bank cards held on the top spot in domestic league table. Out of which, RMB 872.4 billion has been paid by ICBC chip cards, representing a surge of 163% over the previous year and driving the robust growth of bank card payment.