Chinese banking industry, today is in the midst of further reform. Fierce competition has caused sabers to be rattled amongst banks for the best deployment of information technology, the "engine". In the just-released 2010 "Competence Ranking of Chinese Commercial Banks" by The Banker, ICBC in the first place of the ranking with a score of 0.914 in "Information Technology" was named again the "Best IT Bank", the only commercial bank scored over 0.9. The honor catapulted ICBC to the top of the competence ranking for three successive years and reflected from another perspective the crucial bearing of information technology on ICBC's core competence.
Across the globe, IT is part of the business and management activity in a modern commercial bank. Technology is an important metric to gauge the customer services and management level of a commercial bank. It is exactly this reason that causes large banks with strong competitive edge in international spent huge investments in terms of manpower and material resources to build IT system in order to stay ahead of the herd.
In view of this, ICBC has a compelling experience to tell. ICBC advocated and executed the strategy of "Technology Bank" right in the beginning when most of the banking activities in China were still processed manually. Through tenuous efforts in the form of "Relay" all through the years, milestones have been achieved moving from manual processing to centralized computerized processing.
In the process of automation, ICBC created numerous "First", first among the large domestic peers to finish data centralization, first to implement a large-scale core business system independently developed with own intellectual property right, first to set up the intra/inter-city disaster backup system.
After restructuring and going public, ICBC adopted a more assertive stance on "Leading by Technology" and invested further, over the years an average of nearly 5 billion yuan every year in application innovation, information technology infrastructure and self-service device deployment. Meanwhile, ICBC developed its own talent pool and built up an IT team of 12000, the largest and most intensive team of highest professional standard among the commercial banks in China.
The technological strength of ICBC is a result of forward-looking development strategy and continual high investment and the foundation for ICBC's information technology infrastructure and centralized service scheme. In terms of banking automation, ICBC is on par with the top commercial banks in the world and the leader in IT innovation among the domestic banks.
Currently, business processing capacity of the large Data Center, the "IT Brain" of ICBC, has reached the best-in-class standard. The Centre manages and maintains data on around 600 million accounts. 120 million transactions are processed every day on average and more than 170 million during peak hours. Despite the spiraling growth of transaction volume, the availability rate of the ICBC information system remains at 99.98% or above to ensure the continuity and high stability of financial services.
Worthy of note is that in 2005 ICBC built the large scale disaster backup system, the largest in the country among the banks, in a bid to protect zero-loss of data in the information system after data centralization. In 2007, ICBC implemented the intra-city data backup for the hosts in the production center.
ICBC also adopted measures on hierarchical disaster backup of all application systems in order to ensure full backup/recovery in case of disaster. A unified centralized monitoring platform is in place to monitor the ICBC networks, computer rooms and all types of application systems so that the information system can be running safely and smoothly.
In terms of application, the core business system that ICBC leverages on data centralization to develop also reaches world standard. This system comprising of 210 application platforms encompasses business processing, operation management, decision and analysis under one roof and covers all the businesses of ICBC.
The system supports all the management activities of ICBC and meets the requirements of business development and innovation after data centralization. Looking beyond domestic focus, in 2007 ICBC launched the unified core business system (FOVA), a system independently developed by ICBC and has been installed in 19 overseas subsidiaries as of today.
FOVA is a strong IT backup for ICBC to escalate its global footprint.
ICBC leads domestic peers in research and development while implementation of world-class hardware facilities in information system and technology platforms. ICBC has built the domestic largest software R&D center in Zhuhai and four sub-centers (Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou). 3,250 R&D staffs are dedicated to the research and development of software.
In recent years, the application and R&D scale of ICBC has reached 800,000 function points. More than 500 innovative applications and projects are in production every year. The strong R&D capability of ICBC is a boost to its staple of intellectual property rights. At present, ICBC owns 109 patents, leading the peers by over 50%.
ICBC owns the highest number and highest standard of patents among the domestic peers.
Today, any ICBC individual customer can easily enjoy the convenience brought by the advanced IT of this bank: send remittance to a bank account thousand miles away instantly; anytime, anywhere buy and sell gold just by using a phone; pay the bills (water, electricity, gas, mobile phone) just at home or in office; go around the world with just one credit card.
IT innovation enables ICBC to increase its service capability while bringing convenience to the customers. Through 16,000 business entities, 70,000+ ATMs and self-service devices, 358,000 POS together with the strong electronic banking system, ICBC is able to offer all-inclusive financial services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to customers across the globe.
ICBC also uses its information network and mastery of new technologies to launch more and more diversified products to all the customers. ICBC's current product offering of 2,807 financial products in total answers the diversified needs of the customers.
Experts are saying that the next few years will be a critical period for Chinese banks to reshape their business and management through IT innovation, move forward in leaps and bounds and become modern commercial banks. Although ICBC has reached the world standard in terms of technology application, the new service, new business every day and the increased international competition pose even higher demands and greater challenges.
In light of this, ICBC started officially the development of the fourth-generation application system in October 2008. The project has been progressing more than 50% so far. The new system is an application framework which is more flexible, state-of-the-art, high-performance and high-efficiency in stopping risk exposure.
The unified customer information system, fast response capability of the framework, support on the new business expansion, centralized management of information and comprehensive risk management will serve the need of ICBC to streamline future business, move faster in product innovation and ramp up operation management.
Further, ICBC is acting consistently towards the goal of the "most profitable, most outstanding, most admired" world-class modern financial firm and setting up plan to become a world-class IT bank. The mission of ICBC is to "deliver excellent financial service" to all the customers through the deployment of information technology.
