Agricultural Bank of China Ltd - Enterprise Tech Ecosystem Series

Agricultural Bank of China Ltd - Enterprise Tech Ecosystem Series

Summary

Agricultural Bank of China Ltd (ABC) offers personal, business, and investment banking; cash, wealth management; custody, payment, and settlement services; agro-business banking; foreign exchange trading; financial market solutions; private banking; and e-banking products and services. In addition, ABC provides deposits, loans and credit facilities, credit cards, payment and collection, investment products, and mobile and online banking. ABC serves individuals, SMEs, corporates, and financial institutions. The bank has an operational presence across Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and the Americas. ABC is headquartered in Beijing, China.

ABC worked with Huawei to further its digital transformation. It modified traditional multiprotocol label switching virtual private network (MPLS VPN) backbone network to software-defined networking (SDN) wide area network (WAN) backbone network which allowed the deployment of SR-MPLS. Segment routing (SR) capabilities allowed the bank to virtualize WAN link resources, implement unified network resource scheduling and flexible service deployment.

ABC utilized natural language processing, voiceprint recognition, and machine learning (ML) to enhance the efficiency of its AI platforms. ABC expanded its cloud application platform to cover three types of systems, including internal management, business transactions, and data processing to meet the needs of application systems. ABC’s big data platform helped to analyze large customers’ datasets to provide insights which enabled to provide personalized financial product recommendations.

This report provides insight into Agricultural Bank of China's fintech activities, including its digital transformation strategies, its innovation programs, its technology initiatives, its estimated ICT budget, and its major ICT contracts.

Scope

• ABC made improvements in the middle-end platform of retail marketing and its functions such as demand analysis and product marketing. It adopted a digital customer relationship management system. ABC completed the first phase of portrait center, product center, and marketing center for corporate marketing middle-end platform.
• In 2021, ABC launched a fintech innovation center in Xiong’an, China. The innovation center will support the development of Xiong’an as a smart city with IoT, blockchain, AI, cloud computing, and other technologies. ABC will also test the digital yuan in Xiong’an and develop e- CNY hardware wallets with features such as offline payment and controllable anonymity.
• In 2017, ABC signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu, a technology company, and co-established Fintech Joint Laboratory. Under this agreement both parties used their strengths and complementary advantages to develop innovative products and services to meet diversified customer needs.
• In 2020, ABC formulated its Short-term Information Technology Development Plan (2020-2021) in which seven technologies, six middle offices, five pillars, and two guarantees were proposed to promote its ‘iABC’ strategy in information technology to build an intelligent, users oriented fintech solution. Seven technologies included cloud computing, big data, AI, distributed architecture research and development and application, blockchain, information security, and innovation in network technology.

• Gain insights into Agricultural Bank of China's tech operations.
• Gain insights into its tech strategies and innovation initiatives.
• Gain insights into its technology themes under focus.
• Gain insights into various product launches, partnerships and investment strategies.