OREANDA-NEWS. December 21, 2011. To effectively implement the financial and fiscal policies of the State Council to support the sound development of small and micro enterprises as well as the requirements raised by regulatory authorities to help the financing of these enterprises, Agricultural Bank of China Limited (ABC) mapped out policies and measures to fully support their development and grant more credit. By the end of October in 2011, ABC had provided financial services for over 2.5 million micro enterprises and granted credit to over 4,3000 small and micro enterprises with a total loan balance of more than RMB550 billion, reported the press-centre of ABC.

In recent years, ABC has been considering the promotion of small enterprise banking service as an important mean to implement the "Blue Ocean Strategy". By making full use of its network covering vast urban and rural areas, ABC has been fulfilling its social responsibilities at the same time of providing high quality financial services, cultivating solid customer base and boosting the transformation of business operations for extensive small and medium-sized enterprises.
In order to provide customized and professional financial services for small enterprises, ABC has been actively establishing a professional financial service system. So far, ABC has set up more than 1,000 specialized institutions to serve small enterprises, of which small enterprise loan balance has accounted for 70% of that of the whole bank. ABC also put forth efforts to establish two professional small enterprise banking service teams in both urban and rural areas with these institutions and the County Area Banking Department as a platform.

Referring to the system building, ABC spared no efforts to improve credit mechanisms and regulations for small enterprises. It developed small enterprise credit programs and formulated dedicated management regulations, credit rating rules, risk pricing methods and evaluation indicators to simplify operation procedures of small enterprise credit business and realize the one-stop approval, thus effectively improved the efficiency of small enterprise loan approval.
In accordance with the characteristics that the small enterprise credit loans need short term, small amount, frequency and emergency, ABC actively innovated financial products.

In order to support small enterprises' development, ABC also offered preferential interest rates for qualified small enterprises, thus remarkably reduced the financing costs of small enterprises.
To further broaden financing channels for small and medium-sized enterprises, especially county-level small enterprises, ABC established four village banks and a small and medium-sized enterprise business department in ABC Financial Leasing Co., Ltd. Meanwhile, it also issued aggregative bills for small and medium-sized enterprises so as to support their financing innovation, which has won massive praises from customers.

During the first ten months of 2011, ABC's loan balance of small and micro enterprises increased by over RMB94 billion with a growth rate of 20.42%, 9.17 percentage points higher than that of ABC's various loans and 12.68 percentage points higher than that of ABC's loans of corporate customers. This achievement in advance met the requirement of China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) that the increased amount of loans of small and micro enterprises shall have a year-on-year growth and the loan growth rate shall exceed the whole bank's average growth rate.

Besides, ABC granted personal business loans to help small and minor enterprises and individual business launch economic activities. As of the end of October, the balance of personal business loans exceeded RMB110 billion, benefiting over 500,000 small and micro enterprises and individual business.