OREANDA-NEWS. June 20, 2014. Take out your bank card, swipe it before the self-service terminal of fast food restaurants, and swiftly enter your password, then you can make payment on your own within seconds, without signing the receipt or waiting for the cashier to get you changes.

 This is no fiction in movies or TV dramas, but real scenarios staged every day in the McDonald’s of Shanghai. The realization of this application is attributable to the express payment platform jointly established by ICBC and China UnionPay – the first of its kind for the fast food industry in the country.

This express payment platform is the outcome of a payment model innovation project carried out jointly between ICBC and China UnionPay, on which customers can swipe cards for consumptions below RMB 200 at the self-service terminals distributed inside restaurants, without having to sign receipts. The fast self-service payment platform has effectively helped solve the problems with conventional cash payments, such as low efficiency, high change management costs, long waiting time for customers and sanitary concerns about paper money. At present, the express payment platform has covered all the 160-strong McDonald’s restaurants in Shanghai and its EATERY flagship restaurant in Guangzhou. The number of bank card transactions completed through express payment at the McDonald’s restaurants in Shanghai alone has exceeded 1,600,000.

The express payment platform can support both card-swiping payment and non-contact payment. Specifically, the card-swiping payment model is applicable to all the magnetic-stripe or chip cards carrying China UnionPay logo, including credit cards and debit cards; while non-contact payment applies to the chip bank cards with non-contact payment functions (such as ICBC Cool Pass Card). By placing such bank card within the screen induction zone of self-service terminals in the restaurant, customers can complete payment within 3 to 5 seconds.

According to an executive with ICBC, the Bank is currently expanding the coverage of this express payment platform, which will be launched across over 200 McDonald’s restaurants in Beijing this July, and more restaurants around the venues of the Nanjing 2014 Youth Olympic Games, in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in future. It is expected that by the end of this year, customers can enjoy the convenience of self-service express payment by swiping their bank cards at over 700 McDonald’s restaurants, about half of the total nationwide.