Minsheng Bank
China Minsheng Bank has won acclaim for its innovative products and services, even though it was not the first lender to serve precious-metal clients in the domestic banking sector.
Minsheng started offering services for precious-metal clients in 2007. Nearly a decade later, in 2016, it upgraded its capabilities and was one of the first two Chinese banks to introduce a concept known as ‘the gold bank’. This is a separate account created to pool customers’ gold assets such as physical gold savings and gold-linked investments, and to track customers’ gold-related liabilities, such as borrowing against gold deposits.
The creation of such accounts gives the bank a better understanding of its precious-metal customers and helps it to develop tailor-made services to help with investment, trading, financing and asset management, for example.
Minsheng was also ahead of other Chinese banks in providing full convertibility between cash deposits, physical gold savings and other gold-linked investment products for customers. It has embraced fintech such as big-data analysis and cloud computing in its marketing and risk management, and has partnerships with internet firms for product distribution.
All these steps have enabled Minsheng to establish one of the most powerful integrated platforms in China’s banking sector to serve its precious-metal clients, both online and offline.
As a result, the bank has also developed a broad range of products for precious-metal customers.
Minsheng’s leadership in product innovation is also reflected in its proprietary gold trading. The bank leads domestic firms in developing computerized trading for precious metals and in rolling out Renminbi-denominated gold options; this has boosted the annual turnover of its proprietary precious-metal trading business to more than Rmb1 trillion ($145 billion) for the first time in 2018.