OREANDA-NEWS. October 08, 2012. Since January this year, ICBC continues providing more financial services to private enterprises and individual industrial and commercial households, especially through the "ICBC Merchant Friend Club", a new platform of ICBC for serving the merchants. By offering innovative financial products and excellent services, "ICBC Merchant Friend Club" has played an active role in helping merchandize marts, small-and-medium enterprises in emerging economic regions (counties or urban-rural areas) develop their business. At the end of August this year, there were over 5 million "ICBC Merchant Friend Club" members, to 5,096,700, an 83% jump from a year earlier, reported the press-centre of ICBC.

As related by an ICBC executive, the first "ICBC Merchant Friends Club" was established on April 8, 2010 in Zhejiang's Haining. Since then, the Club moves at an impressive pace nationwide with its super-value and convenient services. By end-August, ICBC has set up 3000+ "ICBC Merchant Friend Club" in 37 provinces, cities, districts, providing door-to-door services to merchants in 5000+ merchandize marts across the country through this nationwide service network spanning all counties. Since 2009, ICBC has disbursed RMB 470 billion in personal business loans to 540,000 owners of small-and-medium enterprises and private business owners. These ICBC loans not only address their need of working capital, but also support the healthy and stable development of real economy.

During the last few years, many kinds of large merchandise marts (clothing, leather, hardware, building materials, aquatic products, flowers) or industry clusters have been gathering steam in all corners of China. They are the important forces in driving the transformation and upgrade of consumer spending and coordinated economic development. These special markets are clusters of small merchants. In view of this special point, ICBC leverages its "ICBC Merchant Friend Club" to group the customers into different market segments, build new customer relation model and focus on targeted products and service innovation. The aim is to offer a wide spectrum of financial services (settlement, financing, information inquiry and others) to cater specifically for this type of customers and help them achieve smooth progress, upgrade and transformation.

Eligible commercial customers, once filling in the membership registration forms to join the "ICBC Merchant Friend Club", are entitled to a range of heartfelt and discounted services designed and customized to the different needs of the merchant groups. ICBC steps up its product innovation and service optimization in order to provide more comprehensive products and services to the expanding customer base. Merchant Friend Link, Merchant Friend Loan, Merchant Friend Wealth, Merchant Friend Road, Merchant Friend Joy are some of the exclusive products and services to the members with all the functions under different categories. The "Merchant Friend Joy", a value-added service for the members, is aimed to enrich the value-added services of the Club. Members can discuss business with the customers, get latest information, look for business opportunities to increase personal or company value.

Meanwhile, in order for "ICBC Merchant Friend Club" to better serve the members, besides the exclusive services and special services (discount on settlement, easy access to loan, good income from wealth management), ICBC consolidates many products and services (corporate loan, SME loan, cash settlement and management, international banking, credit card, private banking, precious metal) to offer all-inclusive and multi-functional financial products and services. More and more merchants are now using the Club as a main channel to access financial services. "Merchant Friend Link" is an example. Members use "Merchant Friend Link" package to send remittance totaling RMB 2.16 trillion since this year, meaning an average of 6 million remittances per month totaling RMB 270 billion.