As at December 31, 2014, ICBC had intercepted over 4,000 telecom frauds with its self-developed risk information system for external frauds, and avoided financial losses of over RMB 100 million for its customers, with the daily average funds related to such frauds intercepted exceeding RMB 200,000 in the latest year. Prior to this, the Bank employed the big data technology, particularly developed and launched the risk information system for external frauds at the end of 2013, in response to the threats of telecom fraud-related criminal activities posed to customers. By collecting various types of external risk information, the system can connect to its banking business system, give targeted risk alerts, and intercept risk events including telecom frauds.

According to an ICBC official, to ensure the safety of customers' funds, the Bank has lately deployed blanket controls over suspicious accounts in the risk information system to screen, on a real-time basis, all the transfer and remittance transactions conducted via its outlets, internet/telephone/mobile banking portals, and self-service terminals; give prompt risk alerts to customers, fulfill real-time automatic early warnings against telecom frauds, and lower the success rate of such frauds at the source.

This system of the Bank has truly realized early prevention of telecom frauds. The system will automatically connect to the external fraud risk information back-office database to screen and match the payee accounts entered by customers in effecting remittances. If an account happens to be one involved in a telecom fraud as recorded in the system, ICBC’s business processing system will automatically issue a risk alert to prevent the customer concerned from making any remittance to the suspicious account, thereby adding a safety firewall for the funds of customers. So far this risk information system has recorded all types of information about risky customers and accounts provided by the industry, peer financial institutions, judicial and administrative authorities. The classified and graded information will be applied to the core system of the Bank and business sectors such as personal banking, credit, lending, and bank cards based on different business requirements to provide early warnings and control support to the application for and approval of related businesses.