Taiwan taking steps to boost electronic payment transactions

FSC Chairman Tseng Ming-chung revealed the plan at a meeting of 16 financial technology consultants to the agency, focustaiwan.com reports. The consultants include PChome Online founder Jan Hung-tze and Google Taiwan managing director Chien Lee-feng.

The plans goal is to raise the percentage of e-payments among all forms of consumer transactions from the current 26% to 52% by 2020, Tseng said. E-payments generally refer to payments made over the internet for online transactions.

Compared with other Asian neighbors, the figure of 26% is relatively low, said Austin Chan, director-general of the FSCs Banking Bureau. He attributed the low prevalence of e-payments in Taiwan to the high volume of automatic teller machines (ATMs) -- with more than 26,000 units around the country -- and over 6,000 financial services locations.