(Yicai) July 1 -- International bank card clearing institutions Visa and MasterCard have cut Chinese merchants’ handling fees for transactions made by foreign bank card holders.

Merchants in the Chinese mainland are paying lower handling fees on offline transactions made with overseas bank cards since June 15, according to payment industry insiders.

International tourists traveling to China face no little inconvenience in offline purchasing scenarios because merchants usually do not accept overseas bank cards due to the high handling fees. In fact, the People’s Bank of China has been promoting the optimization of the country’s international payment environment since March.

Major international payment card service providers will cut their handling fees for foreign bank card transactions in the Chinese mainland to about 1.5 percent from between 2.5 percent and 3 percent, financial media Caixin earlier reported. Handling fees for Chinese bank cards are around 0.6 percent, with mobile payment fees even lower.

The adjusted handling fees for overseas bank card transactions have so far benefited over 45,000 merchants in the Chinese mainland, according to Agricultural Bank of China. Other Chinese state-owned lenders, such as Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, also released notices about the reduced transaction fees.

The number of offline sales transactions made in the mainland with overseas bank cards nearly doubled to 1.7 million in May from February, achieving a corresponding value of about CNY3 billion (USD408.7 million).

Transactions made with MasterCard’s foreign bank cards in the Chinese mainland more than doubled as of May 31 from a year earlier.

Visa will invest more and more resources to optimize its existing procedures regarding the settlement of transactions via point-of-sale machines and adjust to policy cost changes aiming to lower small- and medium-sized merchants’ costs, the company said.

Editor: Futura Costaglione