Mobile payment surges in Q3

China's mobile payment use has grown rapidly, with transaction revenue through mobile devices experiencing a 490.2 percent year-on-year growth to 2.9 trillion yuan ($480 billion) in the third quarter of 2013, the central bank said in a quarterly report released on Tuesday.

In addition, a total of 3.966 billion bank cards has been released as of the end of the third quarter of 2013 since the first card was issued in 1985. The number of cards released in the period from the end of the third quarter in 2012 to the end of the third quarter of 2013 was 596 million, up 16.65 percent year-on-year.

However, compared with a year ago, the growth rate in bank card issuance has slowed down by 4.55 percentage points, it said.

Meanwhile, per capita bank card consumption reached 6,097.02 yuan in the third quarter, an increase of 46.85 percent from a year earlier.