GUANGZHOU: More people in this southern province have been turning to overseas banks since they started providing retail yuan services on the Chinese mainland, a recent survey said yesterday.

The survey, which was conducted by the Guangdong Provincial Situation Research and Study Center, indicated that up to 79 percent of the province's population would do banking business with foreign banks in the next year.

"With the retail services and more branches to be opened by foreign banks, it will become increasingly common for mainland residents to use foreign banks," said Shi Yumei, an official from the center who was partly responsible for the survey.

Last month, foreign banks, including the Bank of East Asia, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank and Citigroup, started offering domestic household savings services in Guangzhou.

The survey queried 1,030 regular banking customers in Guangzhou and Shenzhen from January through last month. It also found that 18.6 percent of the respondents had already opened accounts at foreign banks.

Shi attributed the growing popularity of foreign banks to "poor services in terms of retail businesses in domestic banks".

"In many domestic customers' opinions, foreign banks provide more efficient private financing and investment services compared to their domestic counterparts," Shi said in an interview with China Daily yesterday.

For instance, 22.8 percent of those queried had foreign currency savings and more than 56 percent said they were willing to do yuan savings at foreign banks, Shi said.

The long lines and extra service fees at local banks have long been a source of complaints.

"I am really fed up with the poor services at the Chinese banks. I used to queue up for more than one hour to do businesses there, and it really wasted my time," said Cao Xunsheng, an employee of a shipping company in Guangzhou, the provincial capital.

(China Daily 05/15/2007 page3)