Bank of Communications Private Banking
The Bank of Communications private banking unit leads in product innovation and development by providing its 40,000 high net-worth clients with a basketful of investment products and services, some of which are particularly innovative.
The private bank regularly sends its customer relations officers on internships at the leading private banks in Switzerland and France; it also organizes an annual external training course for branch executives, and invites overseas experts to conduct training on global market investment strategies, asset allocation, macroeconomic analysis and alternative investment products.
The bank, executives say, has also been reaching out to clients with a cultural service offering, based on the premise that HNW clients already have everything they want in material terms: what they tend to lack is in the cultural domain.
A few years ago, the bank launched its ‘100 Year Bocom, golden treasures master series’, which brings together nine renowned masters of eight heritage arts such as fruit stone carvings, Yixin purple sands teapots, Suzhou embroidery, Ru porcelain, black tea, coloured glaze porcelain, imitative ancient porcelain and Wuyi rock tea. The masters are famous, so it is usually very difficult to gain an audience with them.
The bank’s private banking unit, founded in 2008, has five departments: wealth advisory, private banking products, risk compliance, family wealth and general management. Together, they oversee hundreds of specialists who offer a range of products and services, including asset management, financial management, private financial advisory, cross-border financial advisory and other value-added services.
The bank has another slogan: “6W wealth management,” which is a system to look at the different angles of wealth: wealth creation, wealth growth, wealth leverage, wealth protection, wealth succession and wealth spirit.
Every client is given a ‘1+1+1’ private banking service team, made up of an account manager, private banking consultant and wealth management expert.
Led by Mei Jinzhi, the president of private banking, the bank has a network of 65 overseas outlets linked to its primary offshore branches in Hong Kong and Macau. It launched the first overseas private discretionary investment service in China in 2008. In 2010, it launched a cross-border wealth management service, one of the first Chinese banks to do so.