In recent years, the FinTech trend has been constantly changing people’s work and life scenarios and facilitating the emergence of new industrial patterns and commercial landscapes. ICBC has been consistently leading the bank’s reconstruction with information technology transformation and sparing no effort to make financial “regular army” the “main force” on the FinTech battlefield, thus providing safe, convenient and inclusive financial services for customers. As of the end of 2017, the Internet-based e-banking business volume of ICBC accounted for 95% of its total business volume, more than four times the business volume of all existing outlets. ICBC had completed intelligent transformation for 15,000 outlets in order to provide customers with comprehensive intelligent financial services.

As is introduced by an ICBC official, while pushing forward FinTech innovation and application, ICBC attaches great importance to following the laws of financial development and technology operations. Focusing not only on the current application but also on the long-term mechanism and the building of a solid foundation, ICBC makes risks controllable. In 2017, ICBC rolled out the update of e-ICBC3.0 and accelerated its pace in “Smart Bank” strategy, comprehensively elevating the level of smart operations and management in IT architecture, technology research and development, business optimization and scenario applications.

With regard to Internet-based finance, ICBC kept its momentum of rapid development in 2017. In terms of business volume, the transaction volume of Internet-based e-banking reached RMB646 trillion, a year-on-year increase of 7.7%, accounting for around 95% of the total business volume, equivalent to 67,000 outlets and workload of 670,000 bank tellers, saving operation cost by RMB120 billion. ICBC Mobile, one of the “three platforms and one center” of ICBC, registered an online banking customer base of 280 million, ranking the first in market share. ICBC Mall reached a transaction volume of RMB1.03 trillion and ICBC Link introduced convenient services for multi-scenario applications in food, residence, shopping and traveling. The balance of online financing was RMB840 billion, continuing to lead Chinese market. The capability of acquiring online customers and services continued to be strengthened. For example, ICBC conducted an Internet-based transformation, with full customer operations as its core, in the credit card field. As a result, the net annual increase of credit cardholders registered 10 million, over 50% of which were acquired from the Internet.

In building the “Smart Bank”, ICBC established “seven innovation labs” in Internet, big data, AI, block chain, etc., and increased capital and talent input in the emerging technology and innovation field. Currently, Internet-based finance, big data and cloud computing have been applied on the corporate-level. Block chain, AI, Internet of Things and biological identification have also been employed in application. Last year, ICBC successfully rolled out its robo-advisor service- “AI Investment”. In addition, ICBC sped up intelligent transformation for outlets, with the number of intelligent outlets reaching 15,000 last year, covering more than 200 categories of transactions in 9 businesses lines, including personal banking, corporate settlement, e-banking, credit card, etc. The capability of outlet service supply, as well as customers’ experience have been in turn substantially improved.

In respect of cooperating with Internet companies, while centering on customers and holding onto the philosophy of cooperation and win-win results, ICBC constantly enlarges its “friend network”. In application of big data, ICBC cooperates with enterprises in introducing individual anti-fraud data. In application of block chain, ICBC explores and utilizes block chain to solve traditional financing difficulties by relying on specific trading scenarios. In scenario building, ICBC connects with multiple enterprises to create innovative network operations like opening account online and co-building scenarios, thus diversifying financial scenario applications. For instance, “ICBC Xiaobai digital bank”, which focuses on the young customer group, was jointly launched by ICBC and JD Finance last November. Since then, around 120,000 customers have successfully opened ICBC electronic type Ⅱ accounts.