Pay Your McBills Faster

Chinese bank customers not wanting to wait for recent Government efforts to reduce the lengthy waiting times being endured across the nation’s retail bank outlets do have one alternative for beating the lunchtime queues.

The only downside is they may end up eating a lunch of spurious nutritional value, given the solution sits inside many of China’s more than 600 McDonald’s fast food restaurants.

The machines allow customers to conduct a wide range of transactions such as paying for their landline, mobile phone, DSL (Internet), concert tickets and airline tickets etc.

Occasionally McDonald’s has promotions to encourage people to use the machines, whereby paying your bill via the kiosk earns McDonald’s food vouchers.

The machines have been around for about a year, but the Government’s bid to ease pressure on banks – announced through a series of retail bank refinements in May – are likely to only have a trickle down effect in terms of reducing the lengthy waiting periods for bank customers.

The ‘fast-food’ transaction machines, or as the dragondata team call them ‘pay while you weigh’ machines, are an initiative of one of the country’s medium to large commercial banks – China Everbright Bank.

The machines have touch screens and are relatively simple to operate and customers don’t have to pay extra service charges for using them if they use bank cards issued by China Everbright Bank.

For cards issued by other banks, there is a 2RMB service charge while the machine doesn’t take cash.

For banks across the country meanwhile, the China Central Bank’s series of new measures will hopefully take some pressure off the need for customers to physically visit banks and reduce the need to do banking in eateries such as McDonalds.

The measures included moves to allow people to pay for utility bills, such as water and electricity, via their accounts in any bank instead of the existing method whereby people have to make payments in the various banks designated by the service providers.

ATM cash withdrawal methods are also set to rise from 5,000 Yuan to 20,000 Yuan per day.