The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) plans to be the first bank in the country to issue tens of thousands of dual-interface Visa smartcards capable of both contact-based and contactless payments. The cards work on Visa’s payWave contactless format, and will be distributed in partnership with a local retailer, Peony Parkson.
ICBC shouldn’t have too much trouble winning over customers on the cards, which are supplied by Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) of Germany: the bank decided to go the EMV route following the massive 2005 data breach by CardSystems in the U.S. that exposed 40 million cardholders to fraud.
Visa recently announced it’s migrating the payWave technology to the global EMV standard.
