Compact discs embedded with digital certificates have been introduced in Shanghai as part of an online payment system run by China UnionPay network.
Ricky Liu, marketing manager of ChinaPay, software provider for the project, said that discs the size of credit cards were already being used by two Web sites to verify identities of users and secure online transactions.
Mr Liu declined to disclose the number of users or transaction volume for the CD cards.
Other payment methods recently introduced in the southern part of the mainland by ChinaPay use short message service (SMS) and wireless access protocol (WAP) on mobile phones, although actual takeup was likely to be fairly low, Mr Liu said.
The mobile payment technology, developed jointly by Motorola and China Unicom, requires a number of messages to be sent between the user's handset, a payment gateway and the user's bank.
'You could imagine how many would use it, very few for sure. Maybe, after some years, it could be as popular as mobile service today in China, under the condition that all related service from merchants, ISP service, handset technology and banking systems were ready,' Mr Liu said.
