Tech giant Tencent has teamed up with Visa and China Guangfa Bank (CGB) to issue a collaborative credit card that can process foreign currency transactions.
On 13 May Tencent announced the official launch of the first “joint-name credit card” in China – the “Guangfa – Tencent Joint-name Visa Credit Card” (广发·腾讯联名Visa信用卡).
The new card is reportedly the first foreign currency credit card to be issued in China.
“This is the first time that Tencent Fintech has jointly issued a foreign currency credit card with an international card company, and is a further deepening of the excellent cooperative relationship that we have with Visa,” said Zhao Weibiao (湛炜标), vice-president of Tencent Fintech, to Securities Daily.
In recent years China has seen an ongoing rise in overseas online shopping, driving demand for cross-border payments channels.
“The rise of overseas purchases, global purchases and offshore purchases has expedited demand for foreign currency cards,” said Huang Dash (黄大智), senior researcher with Suning Finance.
“Cooperation with Visa is a form of resource integration that satisfies demand for cross-border and overseas consumption.”
In November 2019 Tencent announced that it had commenced cooperation with the five major international card companies – Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover Global Network (including Diners Club) and JCB), and was working on tying international credit cards issued overseas to WeChat Pay.
At the time Tencent also supported the use of such credit cards wite over a dozen companies in China, including 12306, Didi Chuxing, JD.com and Trip.com
‘We are cooperating closely with all the major card companies and bank credit card centres, and continually striving to provide innovative and convenient credit card services to users,” said Chen Qixu (陈起儒), vice-president of Tencent Fintech.
“In 2018 WeChat Credit Card Repayments became the first launch of a credit card foreign currency account inquiry and repayment service.
“With this launch of a foreign-currency joint-name credit card with Visa, we hope that the WeChat credit card platform and Visa’s global network of vendors can provide users with comprehensive services for card applications, card usage, account inquiries, repayments and information, to further satisfy the ever-growing demand of Chinese for cross-border consumption.
“In future we hope to establish strong, cooperative partnership relations with even more banks, and jointly provide comprehensive and refined service experiences to users.”
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