OREANDA-NEWS. July 10, 2014. The fifth “ICBC Cup” Financial Design Contest of National College Students, co-hosted by ICBC and the University of International Business and Economics, was officially launched.

With strong support from the Central Committee of Communist Youth League, the contest is open to all colleges and universities across the country, allowing all tertiary students, undergraduates, graduate students and doctoral students to submit their designs. The contest has provided a platform to a wider range of students to improve practicing ability, display talent, and fulfill social value.

The head of the organizing committee said that the contest has begun to receive registration. Detailed registration and entry requirements can be found on the contest’s official website http://innovation.uibe.edu.cn and its WeChat public account “Golden Ideas”. Meanwhile, the contest’s review committee will adhere to the principle of openness, fairness and equality in selection and appraisal. ICBC will also actively seek to transform good ideas selected by the contest into innovative banking products.

By learning from successful experience of the previous four contests, this year’s contest has made breakthrough in the content and mechanism of competition. First, the competition scope has been expanded from the banking level to the entire financial field. Second, the time frame of mock trading of precious metals is increased to four months from the previous two months, introducing more winning opportunities. Third, experience activities of banking products are added to deepen college students’ understanding of financial products. Fourth, the organizing committee will leverage ICBC’s intern base and financial practice center and organize students to join internship in ICBC outlets to enrich experience.

Since its establishment in 2010, “ICBC Cup” Financial Design Contest of National College Students has blazed a new path to foster innovative talents through bank-university cooperation and created a new thinking of introducing social forces and wisdom of crowds to expand banking product innovation. It has gradually become an innovative bank-university cooperation activity well received by college faculties and students with extensive social recognition and influence. In the previous four contests, students from more than 500 colleges and universities nationwide submitted more than 10,000 creative designs. According to comment from participants, apart from publicizing modern financial knowledge, the contest has also provided college students with a social practice opportunity to put theory into practice and study financial products, and has played a positive role in helping students adapt to social environment and improve working ability.

An executive with ICBC said that consistent and up-to-date innovation is an integral part of ICBC's corporate culture. As a commercial bank offering the largest number of financial products with the strongest innovation capability in China, ICBC has continued to focus on customers’ demand and boost targeted and useful product innovation subject to change in environment, market and trend of service demand. As the new-generation information technology such as big data, cloud computing and mobile Internet booms and the Internet finance rises, youngsters and banks are required to play out their strengths and work together for innovation. To this end, ICBC will continue to boost open-minded innovation and integrate social forces including colleges and universities to expand product innovation channels and further deepen cooperation between industry, education and research sectors in financial product innovation. The Bank will mobilize college students with active thinking and daring to bring forth new ideas to explore real-life financial demand from their unique perspectives, come up with more valuable and feasible creative designs and jointly promote the innovative development of banking services.