It will hardly come as a surprise that in
the latest round of one-upping its competitors, Huawei has now ended up with a
bank card of its own. It was announced by company CEO Richard Yu, alongside the
P40 smartphones family, at a local Chinese event.
There are still plenty of details to
clear-up, but the basics were confirmed. Huawei card is heavily digitally
backed and tied to Huawei Pay. This means that users will likely be afforded
similar levels of flexibility, when it comes to operating the virtual aspects
of the card. But, most of that is already handled by Huawei Pay. The new and
exciting bit is the actual physical card, which will operate via a UnionPay
backend to process payments. It also has NFC for contactless payments.
Unlike the Apple card, however, Huawei
card seems to have annual fees, like a normal credit card. As an early-adopter
bonus, Huawei will be waiving said fees for the first year for all users. And
for those that meet a certain amount of transactions, the second year will be
free of fees as well. The Huawei card also promises certain bonuses, like
cashback programs, as well as things like VIP lounge access and other travel
bonuses.
The Chinese giant has also promised to
handle security for the card’s digital copy of the data with the utmost care
and security. The same already applied to Huawei Pay. Of course, that’s an
important PR promise to make, above all else, given the recent and still
ongoing spying scandals. Those concerns and that particular bad press are mostly
Western in origin, though, with Huawei enjoying elevated domestic support over
the past few months.
Even so, the Huawei card won’t exactly be
left to dominate what is officially the world’s largest mobile payments market,
with an estimated $27 trillion dollars of annual transfers and over 8.2 billion
bank cards in circulation. Back in February, Apple finally got preliminary
approval from the People’s Bank of China for operating the Apple card in the
country. Or rather, Mastercard did, as the local payment processing gateway for
the Apple card.
Development on that front has been rather
stagnant, so Huawei could potentially get some head start with the Huawei card.
That being said, there is still no official info on timing for a release.
