To drive the development of national body healthy activity, provide a sports platform for the sports lovers and supply better finance payment and settlement service to the athletes, ICBC, who is the biggest credit card releasing bank in China, released a new member of peony cards family, peony sports credit card, on Oct. 12th, 2007.
Peony sports credit card is the first credit card which advocates sports and health in China. It emphasizes the topic of I have sports, I m healthy and I m happy. Including the powerful function of Peony credit card, high quality service and preferential annual expense, the card brings the pleasantly discount to the cardholders when the card is used in the gyms, clubs, sports yard and sports products stores in China. ICBC also presents sports injury insurance to the players who win championship in the world sports competition and makes the special world championship credit card for them. ICBC will continuously expand the preferential store network in the field of sports and try to get over 3000 stores before August of 2008, which will bring the sports credit card holders more convenience and discount.
It's introduced that the peony sports card has two series with eight types which are dream series and power series, including four brands, China UnionPay, Visa Card, Master Card and American Express. Among the cards, dream series has five cards which have five colors as the background and the card surface has the most popular metal character and combines the element of football, basketball, volleyball, tennis and table tennis which are most popular in China. The credit card aims to lead the new fashion of sports and to pursue healthy quality life. The power series has three cards whose surfaces are the pole of the pole vault, the raceway of 100m sprint and the barbell of weight lifting, which present the idea of prance, gallop and strengthen, and publicize the spirit of conquer yourself and you will be the championship and the life theory of the sports strength raising you and me. What's more, because the card has novel topic and beautiful design, ICBC has made the limited version memory cards to meet the need of collection in the initial period of releasing. Since Oct. 20th, customers can apply the card at ICBC business offices.
We should remind you that peony card always has the closed connection with sports games. In June of 1996, in China ICBC released the first international standard VISA credit card, one card with two currencies and international usable, and it provided convenient payment service to Chinese athletes who joined Atlanta Olympic Games. After that, for every summer and winter Olympic Games, ICBC releases peony VISA Olympic topic card in cooperation with VISA international organization and it assisted VISA international organization to hold the traditional Olympic topic activities, such as VISA Olympic Dream children painting competition. ICBC is actively prepared for the coming important sports meeting in 2008. It will build a more fast and convenient payment environment for the delegations, officials and tourists from all over the world. The measures of ICBC has won two prizes, the fist prize of Olympic key area developing and the first prize of foreign card environmental construction, from Beijing bank card market coordinator association.
As the bank having the biggest global market value, ICBC is always emphasizing the credit card service and it insists on combining the quality and innovation. By the end of September this year, it has released more than 18 million cards and the expenditure has been more than 110 billion Yuan. It stands at the first place among the competitors of China. Now, the peony sports credit card appears in the market with new face, which shows the efforts that ICBC has made to push forward the body health activity of China and exhibits the energy and enthusiasm of peony credit card, Chinese first credit card brand, giving out in the new market environment.
