As we all know, digitalization plays a crucial role in the transformation and upgrading of banks. Through digital transformation, banks can automate and optimize business processes, improve service efficiency and quality, bring higher efficiency and competitiveness to banks, and provide customers with more convenient, safe and personalized financial services, further promoting the innovation and development of the financial industry.
"Glasses Finance" noted that a few days ago, the Asian Banker Research Institute announced the ranking of the world's top ten pure digital banks, and Jiangsu Suning Bank was selected for its excellent performance in terms of customers, market and product coverage, profitability, asset and deposit growth, and capital, ranking sixth in the world and second in China.
Digging deeper into the reasons for the selection of Jiangsu Suning Bank, it can be found that in fact, Suning Bank has anchored the strategic goal of digital bank development since its inception, and has been working hard for more than six years on the road of adhering to the "technology-driven O2O bank".
Digital technology brings "cost advantage"
In 2022, the total assets of Jiangsu Suning Bank have reached 104.3 billion yuan, ranking 12th among the 143 corporate banks in Jiangsu and the third new digital bank in China to exceed 100 billion yuan in assets. Assets, operating income, profits, and the number of customers are all in the forefront of digital banks in China.
One of the important reasons is the "cost advantage" brought by digital technology, and Jiangsu Suning Bank's operating costs have obvious advantages over traditional banks.
Because through the effective application of artificial intelligence, biometrics, big data risk control, RPA robots and other technologies, the operating costs have been greatly saved, and the cost-to-income ratio has decreased year by year, reaching 22.20% in 2022, which is significantly lower than the average level of about 30% of commercial banks. Jiangsu Suning Bank has been called "a model of efficient and low-cost operation" by Moodys, a world-renowned bond rating agency.
Latent genes of scientific and technological innovation
As early as the establishment of the bank in June 2017, Jiangsu Suning Bank was positioned as a "technology-driven O2O bank", with the innate gene of scientific and technological innovation.
"Without financial technology, it is difficult to do inclusive finance", Jiangsu Suning Bank is well aware of the importance of financial technology for small and medium-sized banks, and continues to deploy in cutting-edge fields such as big data, artificial intelligence, financial cloud, blockchain, and the Internet of Things, and maintains a high proportion of investment in scientific and technological resources.
In the past three years, the bank's R&D investment accounted for more than 5% of its operating income, with a maximum of 8%. At the same time, the bank recruits professionals from first-class technology companies, and digital professionals from top universities at home and abroad, such as Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Tsinghua University, etc., with more than half of the bank's scientific and technological personnel and more than 40% having a master's degree or above, creating a strong talent team with rich experience and high innovation ability.
At the same time, it pays attention to the accumulation and application of data assets, and takes digital driving as the core to realize business digitalization and management digitalization. In terms of business digitalization, the company has realized the digital upgrade of core business lines and built full-process digital service capabilities. In terms of management digitalization, we will develop and build digital tools to improve the efficiency of operation and management, and make it easier to use and operate financial services.
In 2022, the Bank's technology expenditure accounted for 6.22% of its total revenue, and it applied for a total of 167 patents, making it the commercial bank with the largest number of patent applications in Jiangsu Province for three consecutive years.
Digitalization is leading the service revolution
Jiangsu Suning Bank's digital work can be recognized by authoritative selection institutions because the bank's digital banking transformation is all-round.
First of all, at the business level, Jiangsu Suning Bank innovatively carried out the "Small and Micro Risk Control Neck Research Project", comprehensively rebuilt the whole process of digital finance, promoted the integration of modern information technology and traditional financial models, embedded the bank's mobile payment, operation financing and other businesses into various consumption and industrial scenarios, and realized the ability to serve tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of long-tail customers in batches, and greatly improved the coverage and availability of traditional financial services.
As of the first half of 2023, Jiangsu Suning Bank has served more than 1.2 million inclusive small and micro customers, provided more than 120 billion yuan of financial support for small and micro customers, and provided financial services for small and micro enterprises to innovate and start businesses and live a high-quality life for the people.
Secondly, at the management level, Jiangsu Suning Bank focused on the digitalization of management, built a unified management cockpit, transformed the management's management decision-making needs for operating efficiency, operation quality and operation structure into corresponding data needs, and created six modules such as corporate, retail, interbank, financial market, financial planning and risk, as well as eight index data dashboards such as scale, profitability and operation, which significantly improved the overall operating efficiency of the whole bank.
At the same time, it launched the "Upgrade Pass" management platform, with built-in functional modules such as customer relationship management, marketing management, mobile business development, mobile office, and business training, to promote the construction of seamless O2O online and offline workflows, and to increase the reach rate of omni-channel marketing by about 4 times, and increase the operational efficiency by at least 60%, which greatly facilitates the daily work of employees.
Thirdly, in terms of customer experience, Jiangsu Suning Bank is the first in Jiangsu Province to adopt a 6-digit simple password, so that customers can remember the password more easily when opening an account and logging in. By using OCR recognition, face authentication and other technologies, it only takes 1 minute for individual customers to open an account, and it only takes 12 minutes for enterprises to open an account at the earliest. In application scenarios such as consumer loans, small and micro loans, and industrial chain loans, Jiangsu Suning Bank has realized second-to-second application, and customers can complete loan applications, withdrawals and repayments online anytime and anywhere, making financial services simpler and enhancing the competitiveness of products.
Digital risk control builds a strong risk dam
In terms of risk control, Jiangsu Suning Bank, which has technology genes, also performed well.
By making full use of big data intelligent risk control technology, the non-performing loan ratio has always remained at a low level of about 1%, which is 0.94%, 1.01% and 0.99% respectively in the past three years, which is better than the average level of commercial banks and better than other digital banks in terms of volatility.
In terms of liquidity management, Jiangsu Suning Bank focuses on small-scale and decentralized inclusive financial business, so it has higher flexibility on the asset side. On the liability side, unlike traditional commercial banks, Jiangsu Suning Bank pays more attention to online layout, and uses online service platforms to make up for the pressure caused by the lack of offline outlets.
Jiangsu Suning Bank's digital banking development practice shows that actively adapting to the requirements of the development of the digital economy and continuing to promote digital transformation is a useful attempt for small and medium-sized banks to build differentiated competitive advantages and better fulfill the mission of inclusive finance.
In the future, Jiangsu Suning Bank will continue to improve the level of financial technology application, continue to promote the digital transformation of business models and management methods, and accelerate the construction of "a specialized and special new digital bank with the largest number of inclusive customers, the most Fintech applications and leading advantages in the core area of the Yangtze River Delta", so as to better serve the high-quality development of the real economy.