Trade finance business and IT transformation for leading Chinese bank
A leading, state-owned bank in China manages one of the largest balances of global trade finance transactions. Over the years, however, the bank has been losing market share in trade finance.
The need for improvement is driven both externally and internally. On the external front, new regulatory requirements are impacting trade finance and increasing the competition from domestic and foreign banks. Internally, the bank needs to attract and work with strategic international partners - but that depends on transaction processing optimization.
Challenge
Overall, the bank suffered from an inefficient, decentralized processing model and outdated IT support. To turn around this loss and become more competitive, the bank needed a new trade finance business model and technology platform - a vision forward, coupled with an actionable and concrete plan.
The bank engaged A.T. Kearney to help their team design the trade finance business model, gain support across units, and assess the technology platform.
Approach
The combined team of bank leads and A.T. Kearney developed an approach that fostered a close working collaboration between the two primary workstreams: trade finance transformation and IT requirements clarification. They also developed a strategic communication plan that included a variety of communication vehicles and targeted timing to reach and engage bank personnel at various levels.
Trade finance transformation spanned the comprehensive vision and core process redesign:
- Formalized the vision for a centralized trade finance operation and gained buy-in of key stakeholders
- Finalized the new operating model for trade finance
- Developed the structure for the processing organization
- Designed detailed roles, responsibilities, and key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Baselined as-is core processes and developed to-be processes
IT requirements clarification assessed the IT systems and designed the process for vendor selection:
- Prepared, issued, and evaluated responses for detailed request for information (RFI)
- Prepared, issued, and evaluated responses for the requirements clarification document (RCD)
- Produced guidelines and test scripts for system demo and evaluated performances
- Identified key functional modules and designed high level architecture for trade finance system
- Identified key transformation issues and designed high level roadmap
Results
The work of these teams resulted in a clear vision and business model for the bank’s trade finance, and a detailed implementation plan for both process transformation and IT.
Contact
 John Meinhold is a partner in A.T. Kearney's Kuala Lumpur office.
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Sherri He is a principal in A.T. Kearney's Shanghai office.
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