Sales Branch Transformation Of Agricultural Bank Of China

Currently, the commercial bank networks have obtained much public attention, because of various issues in the contents and performances of their services, which mainly resulted from their outdated operational pattern. Consequently, the banks and their clients witness ever growing grudges. The banks, inherently, suffer from a major obstacle from raising their core competitiveness due to the difficulty to achieve higher customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.In recent years, the Agricultural Bank of China (henceforth ABC), in the event of its structural reform and public listing, has conducted enormous revamping in its apparatus and the internal procedures, and thus achieved some essential changeovers. However, because of some left-over factors, ABC has been particularly troubled by the issues mentioned above. When there is a diversity of banking products to meet diversified customer requests, there will also be a more urgent requirement on the bank to transform and improve its network. Under such circumstances, it is imperative for ABC to implement the transformation and upgrading mission among all its branches.Based on experiences gained from implementation of such transformation and upgrading in one of ABC’s branch, this paper attempts to discuss the current issues in ABC’s network operation pattern, as well as respective thoughts on the goal of transform, and the path to realize such goal. This paper may provide a reference to ABC’s strategy making and implementation during its network reform, and also shed some light on similar reforms of other Chinese commercial banks.The first part of paper is an overview of ABC’s network reform covering its background, connotation and significance; The second part analyze the necessity to implement such reform; The third part introduces some successful practices and experiences that some other Chinese commercial banks have achieved during their network reform; The fourth part reveals in depth the current problems and its causes that ABC networks are facing; The fifth part discusses various plans and directions of ABC’s network reform scheme; The sixth part is a performance evaluation on ABC’s network reforming; And the seventh part analyzes some difficulties and negative factors in ABC’s network reforming.In the conclusion, this paper asserts that the fundamental objective of ABC’s network transformation is to develop a cluster of sale-orientated branches, on the basis of its original and conventional trade-oriented branches, so as to maximize customer satisfaction, and form up a multi-level wealth management center, and eventually forge ABC’s unique type of customizable service pattern. The strategic principles of ABC’s network reform are:a) to transit the operation philosophy from bank-oriented to customer-oriented, to closely watch fluctuation of the market and customer demands, to further emphasize on product functionalities, and to extend service quality. b) to transit the goal of networking from expansionism to performance and effectiveness, so as to achieve a dynamic equilibrium and synergy between equities, earnings and risks; c) to transit the operation and management structure from a parallel to a centralized paradigm, so as to realize intensive and flat managements. Subsequently, the path of ABC’s network reform will cover improvement of its branch operation model, optimization of branch geography, and reconciliation of multi-level wealth management on the basis of branch operations.This paper adopts the following methodologies:First of all, in order to find out the essential model of ABC’s network reform, both theoretical analysis and practical reviews are employed in order to implement the theoretical results of corporate strategic management, market development and service marketing, into the realistic situation of ABC branch network, with consideration of transformation cases from other domestic or international commercial banks. Secondly, some extensive comparisons and case studies are made, involving both branches of ABC and of other Chinese commercial banks to try to distinguish the best suitable route, as well as to widen the vision and decision-making of ABC’s reforming paces from the successful experience of other banks.This paper is innovative because, firstly, it does not limit the discussion of the network transformation within the perspective of certain branch, but widely considers ABC’s demand of strategic shifting and future development on a higher angle, and to regard the network transformation as a fundamental and indispensible part of ABC’s overall strategic shifting.Secondly, it explicitly explains the four implementation stages of the network reforming scheme so as to keep such reform as practical and controllable as possible. Particularly, this paper innovatively asserts that the loyalty of branch employees is critical to successful transformation of the branch.In order to better study ABC’s network reforming processes, this paper is yet to provide more quantitative data and analysis in addition of existed qualitative reviews. In the future, it is best to combine both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to determine each procedure and step of ABC’s network transformation.