Bank of Communications Seeks to Take the Lead in Fintech

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One of China’s big four state-owned banks has touted its efforts to seize and maintain a leading position in the country’s fintech sector at a recent industry press conference.

On 31 July Bank of Communications (BOC) officially launched its “next generation group information smart conversion project,” also referred to as the “New 531 Project” (新531), with the core goal of creating a digitised smart bank in order to raise the group’s service, management and integrated competitive abilities.

Speaking at the 178th Banking Sector Regular Press Conference (第178场银行业例行新闻发布会) held in Beijing on 16 August, BOC vice-head Shen Rujun (沈如军) said that the project would see the promotion of slew of new technologies including big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, mobile internet, biotech and the blockchain, in order to enable BOC to assume a leading position in the fintech era.

A “1+2+5+N” framework underlies BOC’s New 531 Project, consisting of:

– 1 concentrated and distributed technological framework smart foundation;

– 2 support platforms, that use big data applications and information security to augment smart capabilities;

– The 5 major application areas, which include comprehensively raising the integrated cross-border service capability of the group,  establishing a full channel multi-sensory biotech smart information system that is capable of hearing, speaking and seeing, and vigorously developing a robot services model that is capable of understanding and thinking as well as problem solving.