Postal Savings Bank of China
Postal Savings Bank of China is an example of the rapid modernization of China’s banking industry. Once seen as an old bricks-and-mortar financial extension of China’s postal service, the bank has made a concerted effort to become a leading e-financial institution to serve consumers across all economic classes and geographies, chief among them villagers and village entrepreneurs in far-flung corners of rural China who – until the advent of smartphones – had no access to e-banking.
With the proliferation of smartphones in China, entrepreneurs and consumers across the country now have access to Postal Savings Bank of China’s new e-banking platform, which has 200 million individual clients and 230,000 enterprise clients. In 2017, those enterprises performed Rmb1.5 trillion ($234 billion)-worth of transactions.
“We offer online wealth management products, loans and other financial services,” says Wang Hang, general manager of Postal Savings’ internet finance department, “and also sell postal goods and services online such as express delivery, stamps and online reading.”
The bank has certainly come a long way. It began as China Post Savings, a service of the State Post Bureau, before it was spun off in 2007 into a commercial bank. In response to the rapid development of internet finance, Postal Savings Bank of China came up with its own internet finance plan, which helped transform the bank from one that relied on 40,000 physical outlets to a bank extending services through both online and offline channels.
“The bank has explored a path of self-dependent innovation and built a core banking system by replacing mainframe computers with minicomputer clustering on an open platform,” Wang says. “The system runs well and processes business smoothly, showing stable performance.”
For its innovation and development of leading edge financial applications, Postal Savings Bank of China deserves to be awarded the best transaction bank for electronic services.