Loyalty contactless credit card in China
The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), is issuing a contactless EMV payment card with loyalty functionality.
The card will have contact-based payment as well as Visa’s PayWave low value retail payment contactless application.
The dual interface cards are being issued in partnership with the Asian retail group Parkson in China, whose customers can also use them to collect loyalty points.
The existing Parkson loyalty programme will be expanded, enabling customers to pay and collect points in supermarkets, fast-food restaurants, cinemas, parking lots and gas stations with this card.
ICBC claims to be the world’s largest financial institution and whose website is among the 500 most visited in the world. Working with Parkson it plans to issue the Peony Parkson credit card to several tens of thousands of bank and retail customers this year.
The Chinese subsidiary of German smart card technology company Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) is supplying the cards to ICBC.
The chip embedded in the card complies with the EMV global smart card payment standard. G&D says the issue of the Peony Parkson card represents an important step towards wide-scale migration of payment cards in China to the international standard for chip-based payment methods.