OREANDA-NEWS. May 17, 2012. Since this year, Agricultural Bank of China Limited (ABC) has been deepening its operational reforms and accelerating building a modern operating system featured by "centralized operation, monitoring and authorization" ("centralization"). It has realized the revolutionary change from traditional over-the-counter operating model to new-type operating model with characteristics of "separation of back-office and front-office operations and centralized back-office operation, monitoring and authorization", reported the press-centre of ABC. 

The promotion and application of this new model have taken shape, resulting in an increased basic management capability. On April 21, as the last centralized operating platforms were rolled out in the branches in Shanxi, Hubei, Hainan, Guizhou, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningbo, ABC had completed the deployment of "centralization" in its 36 tier-one branches throughout China.

It is learned that 2012 is the last year for the "centralization" construction of ABC. Since the beginning of this year, ABC has further enlarged the coverage of "centralization", improved the functions of relevant systems, and enriched products of businesses under centralized operation. At the same time, it earnestly enhanced basic management over back-office operation centers and speeded up building supportive management and operating systems to ensure safe, stable and efficient business operation. By far, ABC has established a modern operating framework featured by "separation of back-office and front-office operations, factory processing and intensive operation". It has made major changes to the over-the-counter operation and significance progress in the "efficiency, quality and safety" of business operation. As a result, operation efficiency throughout the whole bank has been remarkably increased; operation quality has been greatly improved; operation costs are consistently reduced; and safe operation capability is enhanced.

In recent years, ABC has made great efforts to improve its basic management capability and accelerate building a new operating model of "centralized operation, monitoring and authorization". The efforts were targeted at such prominent problems as low efficiency of the traditional operating model, inconsistent service standards and stressful risk control. In terms of centralized operation, it adopted advanced technical tools such as procedure control and image processing, independently developed a centralized operating platform, and transferred non-real-time complicated operations such as payment and settlement, account management in outlets to the back office.

A new operating model has been established, where the front office accepts transactions while the back office conducts collective handling. In terms of centralized monitoring, ABC effectively integrated in-advance, in-process and post-event monitoring resources to enhance its off-site risk control over the whole process. It also expedited promoting the application of the uniform centralized monitoring platform throughout the whole bank, resulting in much more effective and pertinent operational risk control. In terms of centralized authorization, ABC brought fundamental changes to the traditional business authorization model and speeded up promoting the remote centralized authorization model to completely separate business operation from review and authorization, and standardized authorization activities over the counter.

According to the overall work plan for operational reform, ABC will complete the coverage of "centralization" in all its branches except Tibet Branch. By then, the concentration ratio of standard business under back-office processing would reach 30% at least.