As of the end of 2016, ICBC’s assets under custody reached RMB 14 trillion, up 22% over the beginning of the year, making ICBC the only custodian bank in China with custody assets exceeding RMB 10 trillion and the nation’s largest custodian bank for 18 consecutive years.

In 2016 in addition to its leading market shares in securities investment funds, insurance assets, banking wealth management, enterprise annuity and other custodian areas, ICBC further expanded its presence in domestic and international market by acquiring qualification as custodian bank for basic pension insurance by the National Council for Security Fund and appointment by Korea Securities Depository (KSD, the only central securities registration and settlement body in Korea) as the sub-custodian for the Chinese market. The international and domestic influence of ICBC has been greatly enhanced. In addition, by leveraging advantages in global business, ICBC has built a global network of custody services. Overseas institutions such as ICBC (Asia), Singapore Branch, and Macau Branch provide cross-border custody services in QDII, RQDII, QFII, RQFII and sovereign wealth funds of foreign governments for more than 150 domestic and overseas investment institutions.

In terms of custody service optimization, ICBC has used its own-house IT system to achieve whole process optimization from domestic to overseas and from marketing to operation, which has significantly improved service quality and operation efficiency. In 2016, ICBC completed the design of the core system for the sixth generation of custody business and will put it into operation in 2017. The system uses the mainstream distributed computing technology to reconstruct the core system architecture of the custody service. It will significantly improve the processing efficiency of the system, and with the customer-centric functional design, customer experience for custody will be effectively improved.