Everbright BankThe credit card center announced on September 2 that it will increase the list of merchants who do not accumulate points, and that transactions accepted by some third-party payment institutions will no longer accumulate points; at the same time, the list of payment institutions that do not accumulate points will be updated irregularly.
As a result, a total of 19 payment institutions have beenEverbright Bank"break into the cold palace". Since the beginning of this yearMinsheng BankThe credit card centers of Guangfa Bank and Guangfa Bank all announced that they had "knocked" over-payment institutions, putting 19 and 16 institutions into a separate register respectively.
In order to encourage users to swipe more cards, many banks have always set up credit card points systems to provide cardholders with points exchange benefits, such as air miles, gifts and so on. Once linked to "money", there are many problems, such as being exploited by some cardholders, taking advantage of, and even making profits.
According to the announcement of the major bank credit card center, the transactions accepted by some third-party payment institutions will no longer accumulate points. The corresponding receipt codes (MCC) of payment institutions published by the three banks show that these third-party payment institutions include accompanying payment, Kayou, UBS, Qianbao, Le Brush, Shanghai remittance, Fu Linmen,La Kara, Changjietong and other market well-known or mainstream institutions.
Wang Pengbo, chief analyst of the Analysys payment industry, believes that the reason why banks have no choice is to crack down on some "econnoisseur", this group of cardholders specializing in "credit card points"; the second is to crack down on credit card cashing behavior.
These behaviors have been banned repeatedly and have become a stubborn disease in the industry. Insiders in the industry sighed that the wool had actually become an industrial chain.
The third-party payment industry is an important basic link in economic activities. However, in recent years, there has been a lot of chaos in the industry, such as misappropriation of reserve funds, reduced to a channel for money laundering and so on. Regulators have severely cracked down on this and rectified it.
On the one hand, the people's Bank of China has adopted measures such as "disconnection" and collection of reserves to rectify the industry and guide it to return to health. But at the same time, it also reduces the sources of profits (interest on reserves) of payment institutions, coupled with the monopoly of the market by the two payment giants, many underpowered payment institutions have to transform, exit, or rack their brains to find another way out.
On the one hand, the "sword" of strict supervision is always hanging over the "head" of the payment institutions, and the people's Bank of China continues to impose fines, and it is not uncommon for the people's Bank of China to show no leniency-tens of millions of level fines are common, and hundreds of millions of yuan of fines are not uncommon.
At the beginning of this year, the two payment companies, Yinying Tong and Kai Unicom, were fined 17.8976 million yuan and 23.2427 million yuan respectively for failing to perform customer identification obligations and failing to perform customer identity information in accordance with regulations.
In April, Shang Yinxin was confiscated a total of 116 million yuan by the people's Bank of China for 16 violations, making it the largest fine in the history of the payment industry. The reasons for the punishment include misappropriation of reserve funds, disguised loan prepaid card issuance and acceptance qualifications, failure to set up special merchant bank settlement accounts, illegal fund-raising platforms to provide payment and settlement services directly, and so on.
Most of the payment institutions that have been "left out in the cold" by the banks are also "regular customers" who have been fined by the people's Bank of China. UBS, for example, has received five fines from the people's Bank of China since the beginning of this year, with an amount of more than 86 million yuan. The reasons for the penalty include: failure to carry out qualification examination in accordance with regulations, failure to implement the responsibility of localized operation and management of bill-to business in accordance with regulations, failure to send bill-to transaction information in accordance with regulations, and so on.
For the current third-party payment institutions, how to face the strict supervision and the new market environment is a problem that these institutions urgently need to solve.