In little more than six months, ICBC drove forward its emerging business of global cash management across subsidiaries at home and abroad since the first among the domestic peers to launch the service in the next half of 2009. By the end of June this year, ICBC has built partnership with 427 enterprises on global cash management, with the most number of contracting enterprises among Chinese banks. ICBC offers strong support for Chinese multinational companies to "Go Global".
Global cash management service is a range of integrated services involving management of global accounts, collection and disbursement, liquidity management, as well as information, investment, financing. ICBC's domestic and overseas subsidiaries and partner banks use ICBC's extensive fund settlement network across the globe to support customers' cash management across borders.
In the past, the business was monopolized by large multinational banks as it posed high demand for banks in offering cross-market and globalized service. Chinese enterprises urgently need global cash management service provided by Chinese financial institutions while gathering their pace to "go global".
On this ground, ICBC has set up a global cash management service scheme with strong functions, fast and convenient, of high added value under the principle of "unified global funds management, unified system operation platform, unified administrating bank, unified bank services".
As of the end of June, ICBC has set up 181 overseas subsidiaries in 22 countries/regions and a cash management service network evolved. Across the major financial and economic centers in the world and regions where Chinese enterprises clustered, ICBC moves aggressively to win overseas banks, 20 so far, in offering cash management services together and reaching most of the customers through the extension of the service network.
Meanwhile, a new generation global cash management system has been developed and put into production. Through this new system for direct connectivity with the foreign banks' host machines or SWIFT network, ICBC is building a global platform for customers to manage funds. To a customer, ICBC offers cash management services for the headquarters in monitoring the accounts of the subsidiaries, centralized collection and disbursement and cash pooling while local financial services are provided by ICBC overseas subsidiaries and partner banks for the local branches on account opening, investment and wealth management and settlement.
Customer information, centralized collection and disbursement, transfer and settlement, currency exchange, account management are managed globally at the same time leveraged on the joint services from banks at home and abroad. ICBC is shaping up its global cash management product to be multi-currency, multi-lingual and across different time zones.
The ICBC spokesperson also pointed out that under the current economic and financial conditions, more and more Chinese "Go Global" enterprises start to focus on the liquidity management and risk management worldwide, and exercise more control on the funds operation in a Group. This offers a good opportunity for ICBC to loom large in global cash management business.
In the next phase, ICBC will remain customer-focused. Backed by the solid customer base and vast resources, ICBC will foster closer ties with overseas subsidiaries and partners to scale up management standard and ultimately market influence.
