Since the beginning of this year, ICBC embarked on diverse marketing campaigns for chip cards and maintained the growth momentum. ICBC chip cards have surpassed 5.5 million as of end of May this year, reaffirming ICBC's position at the forefront of chip card issuance. From the beginning of this year there was an increase of 26% or 1.11 million chip credit cards issued to 5.38 million. A total of nearly 130000 chip debit cards (including Elite Club Account chip cards) were issued. At present, chip cards are accepted at more than 90% of ICBC self-service devices (ATMs) following ICBC's effort to drive up the increasing popularity of chip cards and reach new level of acceptance.

When compared to the conventional magnetic-stripe cards, a chip card has an embedded microchip that can store much more information. Besides all the banking functions of magnetic-stripe cards, new chip cards also include a line up of personalized intelligent functions for offline transactions, contactless transactions, member management and bonus point programs. Chip cards offer additional security since it's virtually impossible to make a counterfeit copy of the card. ICBC is one of the earliest commercial banks in the country to start R&D programs on chip cards and holds on to the top spot in terms of research and development of chip card technology, industry partnership and card issuance volume. Under the approval of People's Bank of China, ICBC issued the first smart chip card in China as early as in 1995. ICBC issued the first domestic chip credit card towards the end of 2005. In 2009, ICBC moved again to be the first bank among the peers to promote chip cards in the country.

According to ICBC spokesperson, as the issuance and transaction volume gathering speed, ICBC chip cards are growing in use every day and bring easy, convenient daily urban life in many aspects to the cardholders. At present, ICBC chip cards' broad community covers industries as varied as transport management, railway passenger ticket, highway toll, commercial co-branding, social security and medical insurance. "One Card, Multiple Use" demonstrates the viability of ICBC chip cards, not only for payment or retail purchases, but could be used in all the value-added services related to everyday living, airline/railway tickets, public transport, highway access or social security. An example would be the innovative product -"Guangzhou-Shenzhen Railway Chip Card" launched by ICBC in March 2009 for the passengers. Cardholders when taking "China Railway High-Speed" of Guangzhou-Shenzhen Railway do not need to queue up to buy tickets and wait for boarding, just "swipe-and-go". New chip cards were warmly received and 100,000 were issued within one year of its launch. Amount which has been spent or withdrawn using ICBC railway chip cards reached RMB 1.5 billion.

Statistics showed that a Chinese urban resident (living in a large or mid-sized city) averagely holds 10 cards of different types: bank card, social security card, commuter pass, salary card, etc. So many cards not only results in a huge waste of social resources, but brings inconveniences to daily life. A chip card has large storage and is very safe to use. Hence it is very ideal as a multi-function card embedded with all the functions (pay for social security, public transportation or travel, membership information enquiry, identity authentication, etc). Everybody just uses one card for many purposes, safe, convenient and save resources. Industry insiders are saying ICBC chip card of "One Card, Multiple Use" points to the direction of how bank cards in China one day should be upgraded and replaced.