Ecosystem Evolution of Financial IC Card and Mobile Payment Standards in China: A Reproducible Review of Technologies, Specifications, and Application Frameworks
Keywords:
Financial IC Card, Mobile Payment, GlobalPlatformAbstract
Financial integrated circuit (IC) cards have become a core infrastructure for secure payments and multi-application public services in China, supporting banking, transportation, health, social security, and other domains. Despite widespread deployment, long-running issues persist around fragmented industrial applications, limited cross-industry sharing, and inconsistent technical specifications between regions and institutions. At the same time, rapid growth in mobile payments—especially QR-based card-free methods—has exposed security vulnerabilities and reinforced the need for hardware-secured, specification-driven mobile financial ecosystems. This review synthesizes the evolution of financial IC card technologies, national and international standards (PBOC, EMV, GlobalPlatform), mobile payment architectures, and trusted service management (TSM) platforms with a focus on China’s regulatory and industrial context. By systematizing specifications, architectures, and ecosystem roles, the article provides a reproducible account of how technical foundations, policy directives, and industrial practices co-evolve, and identifies key requirements for interoperable, secure, and extensible application frameworks based on financial IC cards and secure mobile elements
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