The partnership will allow UnionPay cardholders to pay via TPBank’s QR code and traditional points of sales in the country starting Monday.

Larry Wang, vice president of UnionPay International, said at the signing event that the partnership seeks to take advantage of the large number of tourists from China, South Korea and Thailand who want to pay for services in Vietnam.

From January to June, Chinese arrivals to Vietnam were nearly 2.5 million, down 3.3 percent year-on-year. Despite the slight decrease, China topped the list of foreign tourists, followed by South Korea with 2.1 million arrivals.

UnionPay said that among millions of tourists coming to Vietnam from China and South Korea, many are UnionPay cardholders with a purchasing power of "trillions of VND" (VND1 trillion = $43.2 million).

China’s state-backed UnionPay is among the world’s largest bank card providers with 7.5 billion cards issued in 52 countries.

TPBank ranks third in the number of credit cards issued in Vietnam, according to Visa Vietnam. Its pre-tax profit rose 1.5 times year-on-year to VND1.62 trillion ($69.94 million) in the first half of this year.

Before TPBank, top banks Vietcombank and Vietinbank had signed similar partnership pacts with UnionPay.