OREANDA-NEWS. May 12, 2014. ICBC has become the first bank in China to launch multilingual ATM service. The former Chinese-English service system has been added with another three languages, namely Russian, Korean and Japanese, so that Chinese and foreign customers can have five languages to select when using ICBC’s ATMs.

As China continues to open up to the world, the economic and trade activities and non-governmental exchanges between China and other countries are also on the rise, which has in turn increased foreign customers’ financial service requirements in China while the ATM’s Chinese-English service system can no longer meet the needs of the customers from a wider range of countries. As a response, ICBC proactively launched product innovation and technical upgrading to provide multilingual service in all ICBC ATMs in Mainland China. Apart from Chinese and English, all ICBC ATMs in Mainland China have been added with Russian, Korean and Japanese menus and operation interfaces to better facilitate foreign customers to access daily financial services such as cash withdrawal and account inquiry through ATMs.

In recent years, ICBC has continued to increase self-service facilities like ATMs and improve service quality by optimizing equipment functions and strengthening operation management and facility maintenance. As at the end of March 2014, ICBC had 87,000 ATMs in operation across the country, covering residential communities, downtown areas, merchandize markets, tourist spots and other areas with booming self-service demands. The bank is also expanding self-service into county areas to provide benefits to more people.