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The 31st annual Asiamoney Brokers Poll invited chief investment officers, fund managers and investment analysts to take part. Voters represented fund management houses, hedge fund & private equity firms, insurance companies and wealth management houses in Asia, Europe and North America.

Bank of China only set up its global transaction banking department in 2018. But it was still the first and the only one among China’s big four – Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, China Construction Bank and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China – to do so.

Ping An Bank’s cash management business offers an extensive range of products befitting a wide range of clients, including renminbi cash pool, foreign exchange risk management and business overdrafts. Li Yue, president of the transaction banking department, has led the bank’s drive to establish a cross-bank, cross-border smart cash management platform that allows corporate clients to monitor their bank accounts at partner banks, domestic and international, on a real-time basis.

Industrial Bank has chosen to focus its supply-chain finance business on several key industries: auto, consumer products, green, medicine and public infrastructure. Driven by vice-president Chen Xinjian, the bank has managed to expand its supply-chain finance business much more rapidly than its rivals. By 2019, the bank’s outstanding supply-chain finance volume reached Rmb249.5 billion ($35 billion), a jump of 115% from the previous year. The bank signed up 121 leading companies in 2019, bringing the total to 403 so far. These companies have in turn brought in 4,845 small and medium-sized enterprises as part of their supply chains. That number also represents a 64% increase from the previous year. Financing through the bank’s bills pool reached Rmb143.4 billion, nearly tripling the amount from the end of last year.

In 2019, Bank of China and its offshore subsidiaries completed $5.2 trillion of international trading transactions. It also conducted Rmb7.32 trillion ($1 trillion) of cross-border renminbi payments. Both numbers put it in the top spot, not just in China, but in the world.

Family offices are a fairly new territory in China’s private banking sector. China Minsheng Bank is one of the first to open family offices for ultra-high net-worth clients. Its deputy general manager is Li Wen.

In recent years, China Construction Bank has made a consistent effort to deploy digitization and data analysis in private banking and wealth management to upgrade internal management processes and attract customers, which partly explains how the bank’s private banking division achieved such robust business growth last year.

Staff numbers at ICBC’s private bank have risen from just 100 in 2008, the year the bank secured the first onshore private banking licence in China, to 5,000 today, serving 76,000 high-net-worth individuals and more than 1,300 ultra-high net-worths, with cumulative assets of Rmb1.2 trillion ($175 billion). In the six months to end-June 2016, total client assets under management jumped 22%.

Shenzhen-based China Merchants Bank boasts 49 private banking centres across 30 cities, including in Hong Kong and New York, staffed by more than 1,000 professionals. Assets under management totalled Rmb1.42 trillion ($205 billion) at end-June 2016, up 13.7% year on year.

China Citic Bank is far from being the mainland’s largest lender, but what it does – specifically, providing elite financial advice to high net-worth clients in China and beyond – it does very well.

Part of the widely respected Ping An Group, which started out in insurance before expanding its remit to include asset management and banking, Ping An Private Banking, led by Bonnie Lam, has chosen to focus heavily on high-end clients.

Few Chinese lenders can compete at any level with the global scale and reach of ICBC’s investment products. The Beijing-based lender’s private banking division is often at the front of the queue when it comes to rolling out new services. It was the first mainland lender to launch a global investment fund in Luxembourg. Likewise, it was one of the first Chinese banks to establish an overseas investment fund platform.