Rural Tibetans enjoy more access to financial services

Tibetans living in remote areas of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau have more access to financial services, as more financial facilities have been built in recent years, according to China's central bank.

As of the end of 2018, a total of 5,916 financial service sites had been set up across the Tibet Autonomous Region, covering 93 percent of the villages in the region, said the Lhasa branch of the People's Bank of China.

These sites are often equipped with POS machines, which provide debit card cashback services to rural Tibetans. In 2018, these sites saw an increase of 30 percent in the number of transactions year-on-year.

A total of 38 financial services stations, which are equipped with ATMs, had also been built across the region by the end of the last year.

Rural Tibetans have also benefited from a boom of mobile payments. Many restaurants, souvenir shops and movie theaters in Tibet provide online payment services. QR codes have become common on vendor booths selling Tibetan jewelry.