After two years, the bank's QR code payment reopened

The bank's QR code payment that was once stopped was restarted. Recently, the China Payment and Clearing Association issued the “Bar Code Payment Service Specification” (Draft for Comment) to the payment institution. The opinion draft clearly indicates the safety standards that the payment institution must follow to carry out the barcode business. This is the first time that the central bank officially recognized the status of two-dimensional payment after the two-dimensional code payment was stopped in 2014.

The central bank issued a draft for comments, and the official first acknowledged the status of QR code payment.

After two years, the bank's QR code payment reopened

QR code payment

Re-opening conditions mature

It is reported that the central bank has previously sent a letter to the Payment and Clearing Association and UnionPay to confirm the status of the two-dimensional code payment. According to the letter, offline bar code payment has the characteristics of low entry barrier and convenience, and is suitable for daily small transactions of small merchants sensitive to traditional POS cashier costs, which is a useful supplement to traditional offline bank card payment. The central bank requires the payment clearing association to work with bank card clearing institutions, major commercial banks and payment institutions to issue bar code payment industry technical standards and business specifications, and to make clear requirements on personal information protection, capital security, encryption measures, and sensitive information storage.

In March 2014, the Central Bank's Payment and Settlement Division issued a document to urgently suspend face-to-face payment services such as virtual credit card products and barcode (QR code) payment. It believes that QR code payment is subject to customer real-name system audit, payment order confirmation, payment security, and transaction information. There are risks in the real integrity and protection of consumer rights.

“However, the “pause” of the central bank was not stopped and cancelled.” Dong Xiwei, a researcher at the Qianyang Financial Institute of Renmin University of China, said that in fact, the payment service of payment companies such as Alipay and WeChat has been It has not stopped. "In recent years, with the improvement of payment technology and the implementation of the real-name system of accounts, the payment conditions for restarting QR codes have been basically mature."

ICBC has already made the first move

More banks follow up

In fact, banks have already made the first move. On July 15th, ICBC officially launched the QR code payment product in Beijing. It can cover the online and offline and O2O payment scenarios through “sweeping”, which greatly improved the payment efficiency and convenience, and complied with the consumption of the mobile Internet era. The new trend of sporadic, fragmented and online has become the first commercial bank in China to have two-dimensional code payment products. Although other banks have not officially launched, they have begun to get involved in the scanning code field.

"Of course, the application of commercial banks to promote QR code payment is quite different from the current two-dimensional code payment based on the virtual account of the payment institution." Dong Xizhen believes that this difference is mainly reflected in two aspects:

From the perspective of payment mode, the difference between the bank's QR code payment and the physical bank card payment is only the change of the payment information interaction mode. The background account is still based on the physical bank account, and there is no financial risk caused by the deposit of funds in the virtual account. Consumer funds are safer and more secure. In addition, banks can obtain payment information consistent with traditional bank card payments, which is beneficial to risk identification management and customer relationship management.

From the perspective of payment technology, the payment tokenization technology (Token) technology previously applied to various payment products such as “Cloud Flash Payment” will continue to be used for bank QR code payment products. The advantage of using Token technology is that it can protect sensitive account information, ensure the security of account information during storage, processing and transmission, and prevent the risk of account information leakage.