people film the new sign of china banking and insurance regulatory commission cbirc the newly merged regulatory body at its office in beijing china april 8 2018 reutersstringer shanghai july 8 reuters  china unveiled tighter rules late on thursday to better regulate its 13 trillion credit card industry urging lenders to adopt a prudent growth strategy and monitor risks more closely banks are also barred from using the number of cards issued or market share as main performance metrics and are required to cap the number of dormant cards at 20 of total according to rules jointly published by chinas central bank and the countrys banking regulator chinas credit card business has been growing rapidly playing a key role in facilitating payment and consumption the china banking and insurance regulatory commission cbirc said in a statement on its website accompanying the release of the new rules recently however some banks  are lax in risk management and have behaved in ways that hurt customers interest the regulator said chinese banks have issued a total of 800 million credit cards as of the end of 2021 with outstanding loans totalling 862 trillion yuan 129 trillion according to the peoples bank of china roughly 86 billion yuan of credit card loans or 1 of total outstanding are overdue for six months or longer the new rules require banks to tighten scrutiny over credit card loans and strengthen risk management control banks must also set up a sound system to monitor identify alert and prevent abuse in the credit card business according to the rules reporting by samuel shen and brenda goh editing by shri navaratnam