Defending patient data is paramount for the payments industry, CEO says

The chief of a Chinese health-care payments firm underlined the procedures his company undertakes to protect patient data and said the issue should be "key" for the wider industry as technology develops.

IHD Pay provides hospitals in China with a digital payment system and aims to cut costs for the health industry and reduce queuing times. But holding patient data can be a huge responsibility, especially in an era of cyberattacks and data breaches — as seen with other sectors like at Uber and Facebook.

Eric Ho, the group CEO at IHD Pay said at the East West Tech conference in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, China: "We pay tremendous amounts of attention, put in a lot of resources to make sure that data privacy is well protected."

"One thing about our system is that although we process the facial biometric data … We would never keep those data. In terms of passing the results from the hospital and the user system, in any case, those data would be encrypted," he told CNBC's Chery Kang.