CCB credits 2018 growth to innovation, risk management

China Construction Bank Corp posted 5.11 percent growth year-on-year in net profit attributable to shareholders of the bank last year — a total of 254.66 billion yuan ($37.86 billion) — due to its increased focus on market innovation and service optimization.

The bank stepped up implementation of a strategy to enable product innovation, customer service and risk management by using financial technology, including big data, blockchain and artificial intelligence.

To meet a growing demand for consumption upgrades, the bank accelerated efforts to build a new model of retail banking through exploration of convenient and easy to use financial products. The balance of its signature online express personal loan product was 189.93 billion yuan as of the end of last year, and total individual mobile banking customers exceeded 300 million.

The bank also optimized its credit card business structure and expanded into new market segments. The income associated with bank card fees grew more than 15 percent year-on-year to over 35 billion yuan, mainly because of rapid growth of the number of credit cards issued, installment business and spending over bank cards, CCB said in its 2018 results announcement.

With the help of a new generation of its core banking system and big data analysis, the bank has devoted great resources to build a modern risk control system based on the idea of comprehensive and proactive risk management and to build a digitized comprehensive risk monitoring and early warning platform at the corporate level.

As of the end of 2018, its non-performing loan ratio dropped by 0.03 percentage points year-on-year to 1.46 percent, while its NPL balance increased 4.5 percent to 200.88 billion yuan.

John Qu, senior partner at McKinsey, said: "Starting last year, a few large banks have taken disruptive action by vigorously promoting digitization, online banking and smart banking. They are making a series of strategic blueprints by launching their own fintech subsidiaries, applying financial technologies to their business more widely and making a transition in terms of asset management."