Industrial Bank said it had signed a strategic agreement with China Unicom, targeting at co-operations in mobile payment and mobile banking areas.
China Unicom, the country’s second-largest telecom carrier, joined hands with Industrial Bank Co., a Fujian-based commercial bank, in mobile payment services to catch up with its major competitor China Mobile, who entered an agreement with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank for a similar attempt.
In a statement emailed on Tuesday, Industrial Bank said it had signed a strategic agreement with China Unicom in Fuzhou, the capital city of south China’s Fujian Province, targeting at co-operations in mobile payment and mobile banking areas.
China Unicom President Lu Yimin, who attended the signing ceremony that day, said his company will provide a pack of telecom information solutions to Industrial Bank and work together with it on mobile payment services.
It will help Industrial Bank develop faster in its services in mobile payment and mobile banking with aid of China Unicom’s technical expertise, said Li Renjie, President of Industrial Bank.
Mobile payment services have been in hot pursuit in recent years as the country embraces more and more mobile users. Earlier in November 2008, China Unicom signed a strategic cooperation with China UnionPay to develop businesses in financial payment and telecom services.
China UnionPay, the only interbank network in China, announced to establish a “Mobile Industry Payments Union” in May this year with 18 commercial banks including Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China and China Construction Bank.
China Mobile in October announced that its Guangdong Mobile unit agreed to subscribe for 2.2 billion A shares in Shanghai Pudong Development Bank for 39.8 billion yuan, making it the second-biggest shareholder of the bank.
The official strategic cooperation agreement was signed on November 25, under which, Pudong Development Bank and China Mobile will cooperate in areas including on-site payment and remote payment services and share customer service resources.
Currently, there are more than 20 million users of UnionPay mobile payments and in the first half of this year, the number of transactions surpassed 65 million with the value exceeding 23 billion yuan, according to data released by China UnionPay.