In recent years, with the rapid development of financial infrastructure, the number of ATMs and merchants equipped with POS terminals has been increasing, and financial card payments are becoming more and more popular. According to the statistics released by the Central Bank, in 2015, there were 85.229 billion bank card transactions nationwide, an increase of 43.07% year-on-year; by the end of the third quarter of 2016, the number of bank cards nationwide was 6.015 billion, an increase of 10.53% compared to the end of 2015. ;Compared with the end of 2015, the country held 4.39 bank cards per capita, an increase of 10.03%.
The development of ID cards in the financial sector
In March 2011, the Central Bank officially issued the Opinions of the Peoples Bank of China on Promoting the Application of Financial IC Cards, marking the official mass migration of domestic bank magnetic stripe cards to bank IC cards.
Since 2012, major commercial banks have started to issue a large number of bank IC cards. According to the data released by China UnionPay, China has issued nearly 2 billion financial IC cards by the end of 2015.
As IC cards are superior to magnetic stripe cards in terms of information security, counterfeit prevention and storage, financial IC cards conforming to EMV and PBOC standards are an inevitable trend in the development of bank cards. In addition, in addition to the market expectations formed by the EMV migration process mentioned above, the development of technical standards and specifications will also bring market demand for IC card upgrades, which will have a positive impact on the growth of IC card issuance.