OREANDA-NEWS. February 03, 2014. ICBC maintained healthy and stable development in 2013, according to the 2014 ICBC Work Conference recently held in Beijing.

In the process of serving the real economy, ICBC took a balanced approach to optimize structure, boost reforms, control risks, strengthen service and improve style of work. As a result, ICBC witnessed healthy and steady development with modest credit placement, optimizing financial service, accelerating operation transformation and improving risk management.

Increased Support to Real Economy
Last year, ICBC was focused on optimizing new loans, revitalizing outstanding loans, and improving the efficiency of capital utilization, which has significantly accommodated the funding needs of real economy. In 2013, ICBC local branches have extended new RMB loans of more than RMB 920 billion, representing an increase of 11.7%. Total loans reached RMB 8.7 trillion, RMB 974 billion more than a year ago and above the amount of new loans in 2013. The loan turnover reached 0.89, up by 0.03 from the previous year.

The loans in 2013 were primarily skewed towards advanced manufacturing industry, modern service industry, cultural industry and strategic emerging industry. New loans to these sectors accounted for 85% of ICBC's incremental corporate loan. ICBC has extended USD 22.1 billion of overseas loans to support companies "going global" and foreign trade. Financial services to micro-and-small enterprises (MSEs) have been optimized, with outstanding MSE loans amounting to 28% of ICBC’s corporate loan balance. ICBC offers supply chain finance solutions to support the growth of MSEs. By providing services to over 1,300 key companies, ICBC has added over 10,000 MSEs in the upstream and downstream to customer base with a ratio of 1:8. ICBC supply chain finance solutions promoted the integration of logistics flow, information flow and cash flow, improved risk control and eliminated cash flow bottleneck, and also helped enterprises unlock debt chain. ICBC also provided personal consumer loans, with the increase in personal loans accounting for 48% of ICBC’s total incremental loan, which boosted the escalation of consumption.

Accelerated Innovation to Support Transformation
In line with the profound change in banking business environment, ICBC continued with comprehensive innovation on business, management and products to accelerate transformation and secure sustainable growth.

In business innovation, new services featuring large demand and high added value saw rapid growth, including investment banking, credit cards, precious metals and pension funds. International development picked up new pace, basically creating a global network with improved operation of overseas branches. By leveraging the opportunity from the cross-strait banking agreement on financial opening, ICBC became the first mainland China-based bank to buy stake in a Taiwan bank. In addition, Singapore Branch became the yuan clearing bank in Singapore, the first time that China's central bank has designated a Chinese yuan clearing bank in a foreign country. The clearing volume in Singapore Branch has surpassed RMB 2.6 trillion as of the end of 2013. Regarding management innovation, ICBC was committed to reforms in key businesses and procedures. Centralized business processing has been successfully completed, enabling branches to receive service requests with centralized processing. 59 major projects of the comprehensive transformation of business procedure have been completed, delivering positive results. In product innovation, to follow the trend of consumer finance and mobile internet, ICBC has developed an e-commerce platform integrating online shopping, online loans and consumer loans. Other developed products include direct consumption based small loans and trade-based loans to small-and-medium merchants.

Ongoing Improvement in Inclusive Financial Service
With vision to be a highly-satisfactory bank, ICBC has been committed to provide easy and efficient service for customers by focusing on key issues relevant to customer satisfaction.

In terms of service channels, ICBC has further beefed up electronic channels since last year, installing about 15,000 new ATMs, adding up the sum to over 80,000. With 21,000 self-service banks, services are now available around the clock. 80% of ICBC's transactions has now been processed through elecctronic channels, which not only saves energy but also improves financial efficiency among the broader society.

In process optimization, the priority has been given to simplify process of counter services, condensing it to "fill in form ONCE, enter PIN ONCE, authorize ONCE", which has enhanced customer experience, and improved business processing efficiency by over 20%.

In branch management, ICBC has introduced business traffic based flexible window opening mechanism, "express service counters" and backup support to improve service efficiency. Through a series of measures, ICBC has cut single processing time by 10%, limiting average waiting time to around 10 minutes.