OREANDA-NEWS. December 10, 2014. In recent years, Industrial Bank (IB) has kept sinking its customer focus constantly and took small- and mini-sized enterprises as its key target of financial services. In addition, it has launched a range of supporting measures for system and mechanism reform and offer of preferential services, and fully upgraded its financial services to small- and mini-sized enterprises.

In the appraisal of “2013-2014 China Outstanding Finance Prize” sponsored by Economic Observer Newspaper recently, IB became the only prize winner of “Outstanding Bank in Offering Financial Services to Small- and Mini-sized Enterprises”.

For the fact that IB won the above prize, Zhong Huitian (anonym), an owner of a private business engaging in the development of mobile APPs wasn’t surprised, “Over the past more than one year, my company witnessed fast development rightly under the support of financial services offered by IB to small- and mini-sized enterprises!”

According to him, he started his business in 2013, but encountered the difficulty of insufficient capital. After learning that IB offers a product, “Fast & Quick Loan”, to small- and mini-sized enterprises, he immediately submitted an application to the bank. Beyond his expectation, the application was approved within 3 days and he received the first one-year loan of RMB 5 million, which met his pressing needs. Based on follow-up evaluation, IB also offered the supporting product of “Consecutive Loan” to him based on the “Fast & Quick Loan”. In this way, a seamless connection of loan extension and repayment was formed, not only relieving him of worries about the time limit for loan but also alleviating his financial burden. After one year’s cooperation, he brought his new financing needs to IB again because of the increasing capital needs brought by business development. With his good capital settlement records in IB for one year, he successfully received the guarantee-free credit financing support of “Trading Loan” worth RMB 5 million, thus smoothly breaking the financial bottleneck which restricted the expansion of business scale.

As learnt by the reporter, the three financial products to small- and mini-size enterprises mentioned by Zhong Huitian are special financing products of IB tailored to small- and mini-sized enterprises. Specifically, the bank takes the “Fast & Quick Loan”, which focuses on assets and efficiency, as the leading product, the “Consecutive Loan”, which alleviates the pressure of repayment upon maturity with innovated repayment method, as the supporting product, and the “Trading Loan”, which is free of guarantee, as the follow-up product. With three pertinent credit products for small- and mini-sized enterprises, which are outstanding ones for small- and mini-sized enterprises in the institutional market, the bank provides such enterprises with one-stop service solutions to their financing difficulty. By the end of September, IB has extended a total of RMB 11.6 billion with the three pertinent products for small- and mini-sized enterprises.

In this August, IB also pertinently launched a loan supporting product with distinctive features – online self-service “Circulating Loan”, with which small- and mini-sized corporate customers may complete borrowing and repayment by themselves online via platforms like internet banking, thus borrowing and repaying loans at any time and making use of loans in a cycled manner. In the meantime, the borrower may choose different methods of repayment such as repayment of loan principal and interest in a lump sum upon maturity, or repayment of principal in a lump sum and repayment of interest on a monthly or quarterly basis. In this way, the loan cost can be reduced significantly and the efficiency to use loan capital can be improved.

With continuous innovation in products over years, IB has kept enriching and improving the product families for small- and mini-sized enterprises. Meanwhile, the bank has also kept pushing the building of special organizational system, business process, risk technology, incentive and restrictive mechanism and resource allocation system for small- and mini-sized enterprises, created “six exclusive mechanisms” for small- and mini-sized enterprises, further sunk its service focus, and lent key support to small- and mini-sized corporate customers and relevant individual business owners with loans less than RMB 10 million, driving the upgrading of financial services to small- and mini-sized enterprises in an all-round manner.

Now, the bank has established a three-tier organizational management system consisting of the Small-sized Enterprises Department in the Head Office, Small-sized Enterprises Departments in Branches, and City-based Centers for Small-sized Enterprises and covering business agencies of the entire bank, organized 380 specialized service teams for small- and mini-sized enterprises, thus offering efficient and professional comprehensive financial services to regional small- and mini-sized corporate customers. At the same time, the bank has also taken the initiative to reduce or exempt a number of service fees for small- and mini-sized enterprises, such as overdraft charge for legal person account of corporate customer and acceptance and commitment fees, alleviating the burdens of such enterprises in a practical way.

By the end of September, IB has witnessed a total of 301,200 self-defined small- and mini-sized corporate customers, an increase of 35,600 compared with the beginning of this year; the balance of loans to such self-defined small-sized enterprises hit RMB 101.075 billion, increasing RMB 25.662 billion over the beginning of this year, a growth of 33.58%.

“In the future, we will keep improving the system and mechanism for management and operation of services to small- and mini-sized enterprises, offer all-round, convenient and satisfactory services to them following the direction of national policies, and make the bank a trustworthy partner of theirs”, indicated the person-in-charge of IB Small-sized Enterprises Department.