China Merchants Bank to better serve enterprises

China Merchants Bank Co Ltd will commit to improving its service to enterprises, aiming at unicorn companies as major clients, according to the company's top management on Thursday.

"Technology is only the means to push forward the development of financial services," said Shi Shunhua, president of the financial headquarters of CMB. "Customer demand, on the contrary, is the starting point of each commercial activity."

In recent years, customer-focused service has grown rapidly thanks to infrastructure upgrades and the dividends of consumer market, Shi said. However, the development of business-focused service still lags behind, he said.

In the face of this large chunk of the potential market, CMB decided to start from mobile finance, aiming to take a share from the traditional enterprise service providers and big internet giants like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, he said.

CMB began to launch mobile banking for enterprises in 2010, considering it an extension of its online enterprise services and aiming to provide convenient online business services for corporate customers, according to the company's report.

In 2017, the number of mobile banking transactions in China Merchants Bank reached nearly 90 million, with the transaction value exceeding 1 trillion yuan ($150.06 billion), the report said.

Fan Hang contributed to this story