China's Commercial Banking Client Manager System

With the development of domestic financial industry and our access to WTO,our close financial market has turned open and competitive. In the near future foreign-funded banks will soon get the same position with domestic banks, which is surely to enhance the vehement competition. Compared with domestic banks, foreign banks possess abundant funds, plenty of management experience, advanced technology, eminent services, and prominent commercial credits? therefore they will bring great concussion to domestic banks.In order to deal with the situations, domestic banks are actively taking reforms on management systems. Since the branch of agricultural bank of China in Shunde, Guangdong Province took the lead to introduce the Client-Manager system in 1995, banks in China have followed one after another. Guided by this system that aims at clients and markets and tries to increase the value of clients and strengthens the competitive power, our commercial banks have achieved excellent performances. For example, the ratio of non-performing loans in the whole industry has greatly reduced, services provided by banks has ameliorated day by day, and the vim in markets has continuously reinforced.However, affected by traditional systems, many problems have emerged during the course of implementation of Client-Manager system in our commercial banks. Former organization and management system, which are guided by businesses and characterized by tedious intermediate procedures and inefficiency, have seriously impeded the functions offered to clients by clients' managers. The procedure of discriminating the rights to empower and approving grade by grade has limited the banks' ability to abstract high-quality clients and to exploit markets. Over emphasis on quantity, negligence of quality, and the lack of definitive performance-checking and incentive mechanism have repressed the enthusiasm of clients' managers and increased the risks faced by banks. All in all, all of the above factors have rendered the implementation of clientmanager system all along in the elementary stage and obstructed the exertion of its advantages.As a practitioner in commercial bank, I have been puzzled by problems arising during the course of implementation of Client-Manager system. After studying the system, referring to a great deal of documents and materials and discussing with my colleagues, I have analyzed the innate problems and propose the countermeasures on how to deepen the banks' reforms and fully exert the advantages of client manager system.This article includes five parts. Part one is an review on the connotation, evolution and theoretical theories of client manager system. Part two analyzes the status quo of client manager system in China and depicts the main problems. On the basis of Part two, Part three puts forward the corresponding reforms in organization structure, business procedures, performance management, incentive mechanism in order to effectively carry out the client manager system. Finally, this article lists the main risks faced by banks and proposes some preventive measures. The first two parts focus on the introduction of theories and situations. The third and fourth parts use comparative methods to compare the procedures in the course of implementation of client manager system and then propose some experience and countermeasures. The last part uses the empirical method to test the performance of incentive management mechanism.I believe that our commercial banks are surely more efficiently implement the Client-Manager system and increase the clients' value and competitive power in order to strengthen the role played by commercial banks in the course of economic development.