For Myanmar’s first generation of bank customers, there is little difference between a Visa card and one from China’s state-controlled card-payment monopoly, UnionPay.
With only 2 per cent of the Southeast Asian nation’s 53m people carrying plastic in their wallets, UnionPay’s rapid push into the frontier market will make its red, blue and green logo one of the first that Burmese youth see when opening an account or applying for a credit card at a local bank.
Myanmar is ground zero for the group’s attempt to steal global market share from companies such as Visa and MasterCard. The same goes for countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Kazakhstan and even the Democratic Republic of Congo — all spots where local banks have started issuing the Chinese company’s cards to an increasing cohort of non-Chinese customers.