On February 1, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) officially launched its new achievement - the intelligent account-opening service - for corporate customers in Wuhan, Hubei province. By connecting big data with smart devices on the basis of the “Business Connect” platform, the service enables corporate customers to complete transactions, including corporate account opening, in just 30 minutes, with the requirement of visiting the outlet only once, so that the efficiency of serving small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has been further enhanced.

Sources from ICBC said, the Bank has been actively exploring cooperation with relevant state departments in recent years in providing services for SMEs through its online and offline channels and further promoting inclusive finance, in which it has made great progress. As of the end of 2017, more than 646,000 small and macro businesses were set up through the “Business Connect” of ICBC. The launch of this intelligent account opening service for corporate customers further improves the efficiency of serving SMEs, through which customers can have all these done in 30 minutes, including opening an account, collecting settlement products, printing documents and leaving specimen seal for record, only by visiting the outlet once. At present, this service has been launched as a pilot project in ten provinces, including Hubei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Guizhou, Sichuan and Guangdong, etc..

Compared with the traditional way of opening an account in the counter, intelligent service has the following major advantages. First, it makes the service more convenient. Having kept risks under control, ICBC has sorted out the existing processes of opening an account for corporate customers, and integrated back-office big data to realize automatic display of business registration information needed for opening an account, thus saving customers from the trouble of filling in by hand and visiting the outlet back and forth. Second, it makes operations more intelligent. It helps realize whole-process self-service operations by extending services from the counter and the Internet banking to self-service terminal, posting a new breakthrough in serving corporate customers in the domestic banking industry. Third, it is of high efficiency. ICBC makes the best of its systematic advantages in loading necessary information for opening an account, to speed up information processing and to remarkably reduce handwriting and typing-in errors, so that both risk control and working efficiency have been improved.