Ping An expands collaboration with digital platforms in China

Ping An Group Bank in China aims to grow its transaction banking business through collaborations with digital supply chain and e-commerce platforms. This will enable the bank to serve customers across their trade and supply chain finance as well as cash and treasury management needs.

Di Bao, head of trade and supply chain finance at Ping An, believes that the bank’s success may not only come from providing financing but also from its ability to open accounts at scale through its online ecosystem collaborations and the use of Internet of things (IoT) data.

The bank aims to meet its customers’ transactional banking needs through platforms such as its global treasury management platform that allows customers to strategically manage their cash management, financing, and treasury requirements, according to Zhou Bo and Frank Liu, who lead the bank’s cash and treasury management business.

It faces three main challenges across its transaction banking business: integrating data into risk control, developing new financing models, and serving a wide range of customers. To tackle these challenges, the bank is attempting to leverage technology and digital innovation in accounts, data, transactions, and ‘openness’.

Through its Xingyun (Nebula) IoT platform, the bank utilises artificial intelligence and blockchain to collect and analyse data with the aim of improving it and reaching a broader range of customers with digital accounts through direct application programming interface connections, quick response code scans and mobile app downloads.

The bank has developed a new supply chain finance model to extend credit to facilitate prepayment and pre-shipping financing, and IoT monitoring to improve post-loan management. It is promoting a deep integration into the digital economy and the real economy through Nebula that it claims has disbursed over RMB 650 billion ($100.3 billion) in financing to the real economy since 2019. By the end of 2022, the programme had served over 21,000 customers with over 20 million IoT terminals.

Its treasury management system allows businesses to access over 100 bank accounts worldwide to enable sweeping and netting of balances, payments, review of liquidity positions, balance sheets as well as account reconciliation and other management data analysis. It aims to move from a transactional treasury to a strategic treasury, providing core capabilities for value creation, forward-looking management, data intelligence, and business innovation.

Its commercial draft integration service, a supply chain finance programme, provides electronic commercial drafts for trade payments and discounting. Launched in 2020, the programme was commercially released in 2022 and has achieved some market success, in terms of volume and income growth.

Ping An Bank is also focused on providing financial solutions to small and micro businesses in China such as digital credit and e-collection products that provide small businesses and merchants access to financing and tools for collecting payments on e-commerce platforms.