Chinese mobile payments up in Q1

BEIJING - People in China made more payments with mobile phones in the first quarter of 2017, central bank data showed Thursday.

Chinese commercial banks dealt with 9.3 billion payments from mobile banking services in Q1, up 65.7 percent from a year ago, the People's Bank of China, the central bank, said in a report.

Combined value of mobile payments rose 16.4 percent to 60.65 trillion yuan ($9 trillion).

The surge is partly due to the number of mobile phone users in China. At the end of April, there were 1.35 billion mobile phone users, of which more than 1 billion had broadband Internet access.

Payments from online banking services made with computers rose 8.17 percent to 11.3 billion, with total value edging up 0.14 percent to 658.78 trillion yuan.

China's financial institutions had issued 6.3 billion bank cards by the end of March, up 10.7 percent year on year. The number of credit cards stood at 490 million, according to the report.