In the first quarter of 2024, Bohai Bank Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Bohai Bank”) thoroughly implemented the decisions and arrangements of the Party Central Committee, implemented the Tianjin Municipal Committee and Municipal Government and regulatory requirements, continued to promote the “Four Good Works and Good Achievements” and the “Ten Actions” of services, continuously enhanced financial innovation and operation capabilities, and innovated financial products, standards and services. In particular, as the “first batch” of pilot financial institutions of the Shanghai Bill Exchange, the bank has continued to increase credit support for the real economy and enhance the inclusiveness and applicability of financial services in the industrial chain since it successfully launched a next-generation bill business system in 2022. Currently, it has served more than 6,000 customers and issued nearly 100 billion yuan of next-generation notes, making Bills, a close partner of small and medium-sized enterprises, providing more and more detailed and thoughtful services for China's real economic development.
Enhancing the ability to serve the real economy through bill innovation
The new generation of notes has broken the fixed bill attributes that have been hampering the development of commercial money orders for a long time, accelerates the transformation of bill business with the convenience of being split and transferable, promotes the integration of notes into the enterprise supply chain, promotes accounts receivable invoicing, and at the same time greatly reduces corporate financing costs and promotes the circulation of bills at no cost.
Relying on the next-generation bill business system, Bohai Bank's next-generation bill is centered on customer needs, and enhances the online customer experience with a 7*24 hour service; through more automated operation, it automatically links billing information and price information to business applications. The process is simple and quick, and customers do not need to fill in the manual form process; for corporate ticketing needs, whether it is partial payment requirements, urgent cash requirements, or due collection, it can give enterprises a variety of choices. How much to use and split to help enterprises circulate with one click.
In addition, Bohai Bank's next-generation bill system not only supports full-process services such as ticketing, acceptance, discounting, endorsement, signing, and pledge, and can be fully batch operated or scheduled for various transactions; it also newly supports self-service online applications for changing “non-transferable” notes to “transferable” notes, adding a non-transferable cancellation function to help enterprises change with one click. These six major features not only solve many of the pain points of enterprise ticketing, but also enhance the enterprise ticketing experience from all aspects of the bill life cycle, reduce operational risks, and further enhance the ability of bills to serve the real economy and small and micro enterprises.
Since the launch of Bohai Bank's next-generation bill system, it has served more than 6,000 customers and issued nearly 100 billion yuan of next-generation notes. At the same time, the bank has responded positively to the bill market's “Initiative to Accelerate the Access and Promotion of China's Bill Business System” to guarantee infrastructure and system resources and accelerate bill transformation. Up to now, the bank's next-generation bill issuance conversion rate has reached 98.22%.
Stimulate the vitality of private economic development with flexibility and precision
As a major traditional manufacturing province, Hebei Province has continued to accelerate the construction of a number of industrial clusters such as next-generation information technology and high-end equipment manufacturing in recent years, promoting the revenue of industrial clusters such as biomedicine, next-generation information technology, new energy vehicles, and intelligent connected vehicles to take the lead in breaking 100 billion.
Bohai Bank uses the Shijiazhuang branch as a fulcrum, based on the actual industry in Hebei Province, focusing on stock markets such as steel and coal, and incremental markets such as pharmaceuticals and electronics. It leverages the advantages of low threshold, high efficiency, and low interest rates to help improve the quality and efficiency of the core supply chain and industrial chain, and promote industrial development and upgrading in Hebei Province.
According to information, in 2023, in the past two years, Bohai Bank provided more than 27 billion yuan in bill discount support to physical enterprises in Hebei Province, of which the manufacturing industry accounted for 66%, private enterprises accounted for 58%, and technology enterprises accounted for 27%; under the guidance of the Shijiazhuang branch of the People's Bank of China, it used science and technology innovation notes and green notes to discount “express” tools to nearly 100 private, small, micro, science and technology, green customers, etc., totaling 2.3 billion yuan in low-cost bill financing support, effectively implementing accurate drip irrigation and implementing financial corporate social responsibility.
At the beginning of this year, Bohai Bank launched the first new commercial ticket guarantee business, solving the difficulties of a large construction engineering company in Shijiazhuang that many banks were unable to use due to mismatched business requirements, and used the company as the credit grantor and 27 upstream suppliers as financiers to achieve shared transmission of core enterprise credit in its supply chain.
Recently in Tangshan, the head of finance at an equipment manufacturing company also expressed high recognition for Bohai Bank's next-generation bill business services. Thanks to the ease of settlement of the bank's next-generation notes, the company can split the notes according to its own capital requirements to solve the financial problem flexibly — taking the example of receiving 5 million yuan notes, if it only needs to pay 1 million yuan in a single transaction, it can split and then pay with 1 million notes. Compared with the previous model of 5 million yuan being fully discounted and then paid in cash, it can save nearly 70,000 yuan in discounted interest expenses.
The next-generation bill business system has solved many problems that have limited the development of the bill market for a long time, and has laid an important foundation for the new development pattern of the bill market in the new era.
As an active practitioner of inclusive finance, in the next step, Bohai Bank will regard the bill business as the strategic direction of the company's business, actively build a bill center, manage the entire product and life cycle of the bill business, continuously improve product service experience, improve bill service capabilities, help enterprises build bill settlement systems, promote bill circulation, reduce overall financing costs in the enterprise supply chain, and improve capital turnover efficiency and financing convenience for supply chain and industrial chain enterprises. It will continue to demonstrate the bank's strong innovation ability in the financial field and determination to serve the real economy.