In recent years, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), centering on promoting the supply-side structural reform, continues to deepen small and micro-financial strategy and to meet financing demands of the real economy at the small-and-micro level by actively leveraging bill discounting to help small and micro-enterprises (SME) broaden financing channels, reduce financing cost and ease liquidity strain. According to the data, the accumulated bill discounting conducted by ICBC in 2017 surpassed RMB806 billion, among which RMB360 billion was offered to SMEs.

As introduced by an official of ICBC, the debt financing demand of SMEs features small value, high frequency and strong liquidity. Compared to equity, financial claims and loans, bill financing is simpler and more flexible, and has high liquidity at lower cost. ICBC has adopted multiple preferential measures for SMEs in this area from the following three aspects: 1) By implementing independent fund balancing and operating mechanism, ICBC prioritizes sufficient supply in terms of fund scale for the bills of SMEs; 2) By implementing independent fund measurement, allocation and assessment policies, ICBC grants preferential terms to the bills of SMEs in funding prices based on the external operating environment and the changes in actual demands; 3) While sticking to the path of centralization and professionalization, ICBC continues to speed up the circulation of bills of SMEs and expand the size of bill discounting for them through intra-bank concentration, re-discounting and other channels.

In actively serving the SMEs, ICBC has consistently and vigilantly guarded against any potential risks and adopted multiple measures to ensure the constant enhancement in risk prevention and control capabilities concerning bills. By keeping a close watch on new characteristics and changes of the bill market, ICBC strengthens risk alert and early warning of external risk events. ICBC further promotes the risk management and control capacity through the innovative application of intelligent system to step up off-site monitoring and continue to consolidate the “Three Lines of Defense”, namely control at the front office, balancing at the middle office and supervision at the back office, which effectively guarantees the compliance and steady development of bill services and helps the bank maintain a relatively healthy bill assets quality.