Despite extreme depression and export decline of world economy due to global financial crisis originated in USA, China is drawing growth of world economy by achieving high economic growth rate of 8% in 2009 and 10.1% in 2010. The background that Chine...
Despite extreme depression and export decline of world economy due to global financial crisis originated in USA, China is drawing growth of world economy by achieving high economic growth rate of 8% in 2009 and 10.1% in 2010. The background that Chinese economy can continue a high growth trend like this is because the conversion from the existing export and investment-oriented economic growth model to domestic consumption-oriented economic growth model is being progressed. Since the latter half of 2008, Chinese Government has promoted an active expansion policy of domestic demand, so it is judged that if the consumption market is expanded, the credit card market would be expanded as well.
The Chinese credit card market started through Changcheng card issuing at a Beijing branch of the Bank of China in 1986, started to grow while providing large-scale issuing since 2003, and is predicted that it will get larger to the largest scale in the world until 2020. When adding credit cards and debit cards, the number of cards issued until the end of June in 2010 amounts to 2.3billion pieces, so this is a value increased by 14.5% on a year over year. While competition between card companies get heated, the scale of card transaction amount inside China in 2009 has recorded 7 trillion 700 billion Yuan (1300 trillion won) which is increased by 84 times compared to 2001, so the credit card industry is being risen as a blue-chip market. When viewing the number of credit cards per one person of economically-active population of China, it is 0.18 card, so as its issuing scale is small compared to 4.2 cards of Korea, 4.39 cards of USA and 0.95card of Brazil, etc. Therefore, its growth possibility and potential are huge.
However, since press releases that credit card’s balance due is rapidly increasing by 126% on a year over year because of recent reckless card marketing of banks and moral hazard of users, the interest in credit card insolvency issues of China is being also increasing.
Korea has already experienced household bad-credit and liquidity crisis of credit card companies caused by rapid increase of credit card use in early 2000s.
United States has also experienced card crisis in 1990s and also has a long development process as a country that issued credit card first.
This thesis has suggested the future development direction of Chinese credit card market through growth processes of card industry in advanced countries, and it can be summarized as follows.
Firstly, it is to improve related law legislation and using environment. The Government needs to quickly establish legislative issues related to credit cards, and need to clearly regulate rights and obligations of each interested party.
Secondly, it is to introduce a personal credit information search system. In the meanwhile, the rating criteria on a personally credited person between banks and cities were respectively different and information sharing was not performed well, so several problems such as card defensive lending, etc. occurred. Therefore, the information asymmetry on a personally credited person should be reduced.
Thirdly, the risk notification system and fraud should be prevented. Card-issuing banks must establish a risk prevention system that introduced advanced techniques by benchmarking a risk management system of individual credit card customers, which companies use in the overseas market.
Fourthly, it is to manage operation risk inside a bank. Scientific and generalized credit card’s business management method and processing procedures should be legislated and should be guaranteed to be accurately processed in all service lines.
In the future, as a facing subject of the Chinese credit card market, the service of banks which are card issuers should be improved and the cognition and recognition on credit cards of consumers should be changed much.
Card-issuing banks must supply products capable of satisfying demand of consumers as a differentiated strategy. Lastly, when the regulation policy of the Government in market revitalization and development should be supported, the market could healthily develop overall.