Attention! Another big bank announcement: Clean up these types of bank cards! Related | Credit Card | Bank Card
Recently, the Agricultural Bank of China announced that it will gradually carry out investigation and cleaning work on personal long-term inactive passbook accounts starting from July. Specifically, if the current passbook meets the following three conditions simultaneously, it will be included in the scope of investigation and cleaning. One is that as of the end of December 2022, there have been no transactions for more than five years; The second is that the deposit balance is zero; Thirdly, there are no other related businesses. In recent years, the number of bank accounts in China has continued to grow, but there are also "sleep accounts" among them. According to data from the People's Bank of China, as of the end of 2022, a total of 14.167 billion bank accounts were opened nationwide, including 14.074 billion personal bank accounts. The so-called "sleep account" usually refers to accounts that have not engaged in active customer transactions for more than three consecutive years, have zero account balance, and have not signed credit card, personal loan repayment, or other collection and payment agreements. Several banks have launched "card suspension" actions since the beginning of this year, and many banks have issued notices stating that they will carry out standardized management of credit card related businesses. Overall, the management direction mainly focuses on cleaning sleep cards, restricting single cardholders from holding excessive credit cards, and optimizing installment business. Bank of China announced that starting from March 20th, it will gradually reduce, suspend, or cancel credit cards that have been dormant for 18 consecutive months or more without any active transactions, outstanding repayments, or deposits. Starting from March 31st, Hengfeng Bank will gradually stop using and cancel long-term dormant credit cards that have been issued for more than 18 months but have not been activated, or have been activated but have not engaged in active transactions for more than 18 consecutive months and have zero current overdraft balance and overpayment. Ping An Bank announced that it will notify some long-term sleeping customers who meet the conditions through AI phone calls or text messages starting from April 1st. If customers fail to operate the cards according to the notification requirements within the specified period, they will be subject to card cancellation or account closure measures. In fact, the banking industry has been carrying out the cleaning of "sleep accounts" for many consecutive years. In October 2020, the inter ministerial joint meeting of the State Council to crack down on new types of illegal and criminal activities in telecommunications networks decided to launch a nationwide "card interruption" action. Subsequently, the banking industry began to clean up "sleep accounts" to better protect the legitimate rights and interests of cardholders. "This is necessary and urgent, which helps to eradicate the soil that breeds fraud from the source," said Dong Ximiao, Chief Researcher of Zhaolian. Why do we clean up sleep accounts on a large scale? "Since the second half of last year until now, various banks have successively issued announcements to standardize the management of credit card business. From the content of bank announcements this year, in addition to strengthening monitoring of the flow of credit card funds, cleaning up long-term unused credit cards is still a key task." Wang Pengbo, a senior analyst in the financial industry at Broadcom Analytics, said that cleaning up sleeping accounts by banks has two major benefits: first, reducing management costs, and second, preventing illegal crimes such as telecommunications fraud and money laundering. Senior credit card expert Dong Zheng pointed out that for banks, clearing sleep cards is necessary. On the one hand, although sleep cards are not used in daily life, they are still in the bank's database, so there will be management costs; On the other hand, banks have less monitoring on sleep cards, which poses certain financial risks. W
