OREANDA-NEWS. April 05, 2011. Recently, ICBC won the country award for "Best Retail Bank in China" and category award for "Best Large-Scale Retail Bank in China" from the Asian Banker at the "Excellence in Retail Financial Services Programme 2011", distinguishing itself from its other competitors. This year's competition attracted more than 150 banks from 29 countries taking part in the evaluation, 12 banks from China. After multiple stages of screening by the panel of Asian Banker judges, ICBC winning this only major award to the best player in China bears testament to the recognition from international respected publication on ICBC's excellence in retail banking, reported the press-centre of ICBC.

Amongst the grounds for the ICBC's success to be named as "Best Retail Bank in China" by the Asian Banker was the Bank's strong performance in marketing and promotion, product innovation, service improvement, channel consolidation risk control and charity program, said an executive with ICBC. Over the past few years, ICBC shifted the strategic play from "Large" to "Strong", building up its core competence through product innovation and fast response to market needs. Efforts have been spent to tap fresh market, improve service quality to maintain fast growth of all businesses and reinforce the Bank's market dominance. ICBC has secured 26 million personal customers more from the beginning of 2010, to 260 million at the end of the year. Assets from mid-range to top-end customers accounted for 82.46%, up 0.7 percentage points from the beginning of 2010. The retail banking business of ICBC is moving at an impressive pace.

Personal banking services catch the most attention of all. In 2010, ICBC took the opportunity of the "Service Value Year" and financial services for the World Expo and the Asian Games to upgrade its service level. All ICBC branches put prodigious efforts to maintain high standard of financial services for the two mega events with "zero error", "zero incident", "zero complaint". ICBC won the praise from all domestic and overseas customers, by lifting up its brand and image through excellent financial services. Meanwhile, ICBC fully embraces "Customer First" to build up a service value chain across all branches that truly putting ICBC clients first, by taking all necessary measures to restructure the business processes, simplify the application steps, consolidate the resources, deploy more self-service devices, arrange flexible service hours and service approach, coordinate services among different job positions and launch the performance pledge system for internal services. ICBC maintained the highest standard of services while serving massive number of customers.

"Asian Banker - Excellence in Retail Finance Services Awards" was instituted in 2002 on the premise that an outstanding institution in consumer banking, in Asia Pacific, Central Asia, Middle East and Europe, that demonstrate a sustainable franchise based on strong business processes. The programme is currently the most rigorous, prestigious awards programme for consumer banking in Asia Pacific.