Nowadays, people in China prefer to use bank cards for their holiday shopping, driven by the prevalence of modern payment methods and change in spending habits among the folks. ICBC cardholders spent RMB 75 billion during the 2012 Spring Festival holiday (from the New Year's Eve to the fifteenth day), as revealed by ICBC today. During the holiday, customers use ICBC credit cards to make installment payments totaling more than RMB 3 billion.

With an aim to offer more comprehensive financial services to cardholders during the Spring Festival holiday, ICBC launched a range of fabulous promotions on card spending across the country for customers to enjoy exciting offers and discounts in shopping, traveling and dinning which effectively encouraged the cardholders to use ICBC bank cards, said an executive with the Bank. Besides, ICBC also steps up its Telephone Banking Center services. During the holiday, nearly 99% calls were answered in 20 seconds, demonstrating the real-time, highly efficient services to the ICBC credit card holders.

Bank cards as a modern payment method play an active role to stimulate consumer growth and restructure the economy. In view of this, in recent years ICBC has focused consistently on product innovation, service optimization and improvement in card payment acceptance environment, offering innovative payment method for cardholders to use bank card for spending. As of today, ICBC has a full range of branded bank card products with different types (magnetic stripe card, chip card, magnetic stripe + chip) in multiple currencies. In 2011, total amount spent or withdrawn using ICBC bank cards surpassed RMB 3.2 trillion, or an increase of around 43% from a year ago. Nearly RMB 980 billion has been spent or withdrawn using ICBC credit cards, rising more than RMB 330 billion from a year ago, or over 50%. The total outstanding credit loans went beyond RMB 170 billion, representing a jump of around 94% from the beginning of the year. While spending efforts on card acceptance environment and service improvement, ICBC has installed a great number of bank card terminals/devices over the past few years, up to 50,000 ATM and 600,000+ POS so far. The Bank also spent efforts to upgrade the service network and availability of bank card terminals/devices. In 2011, over 5 billion transactions processed through ATMs involving an amount of more than RMB 4.8 trillion. ICBC also focused on signing up merchants, to 590,000 merchants accepting ICBC credit cards as of today.