Agricultural Bank of China
Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), managed by president Zhang Qingsong, has a natural advantage over its Chinese peers when it comes to the retail market: it has at least 20,000 branches in mainland China, serving more than 600 million clients nationwide and providing its retail precious metal clients easy access to the products on offer.
The number of such clients had grown by nearly 20% by the end of 2019, to reach 23 million.
ABC offers a broad range of products to its customers, spanning physicals, gold investment as well as trading. The bank’s overall precious-metal trading volume beat that of its largest state-owned bank peers in 2019.
On top of its already comprehensive lines of at least 1,000 physical products, ABC launched several of what it considered to be key products for 2019. These include new gold bars with high investment value, as well as innovative products co-designed with renowned brands such as Disney and the Palace Museum. These key products contributed to the best sales volume ABC had seen in three years, up 22% from 2018.
But ABC did not rely purely on its retail network. It also actively expanded its presence through online platforms. Throughout 2019, ABC launched a number of campaigns and promotions to drive traffic to its e-banking platform, which resulted in a 50% increase in sales volume over the course of last year.
The bank’s online strategy proved invaluable in complementing its already deep physical network: a quarter of the transactions were completed outside branch business hours.