SHENZHEN Ping An Bank is targeting organic growth as its main expansion tool at present with four more branches in the pipeline, its president said in Shanghai yesterday.
The banking arm of the Ping An Insurance (Group) Co, the No. 2 insurer on China's mainland, has approval to open two branches in Quanzhou and Xiamen in Fujian Province soon and has applied to the China Banking Regulatory Commission to open two in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province and Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, Richard Jackson said.
The bank yesterday opened a sub-branch on the Bund, its fourth such outlet in the city.
The bank now has a presence in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Fuzhou.
"We are working on natural expansion at the moment," Jackson said. "There is nothing at the moment related to acquisition."
Jackson said the bank's capital adequacy ratio sat at 10.1 percent at the end of June, up from the regulatory minimum of 8 percent, indicating that there was no immediate need for a bailout from the group.
Ping An Insurance (Group) said last Friday that it would inject 4.95 billion yuan (US$725 million) into its life insurance unit as premium growth eroded the subsidiary's ability to handle payouts.
Peter Ma, chairman and executive officer of Ping An Insurance (Group), said in August that the group had plenty of capital on hand for the short-term development of its business including insurance, banking and assets management.
The group strengthened its banking capacity by merging Shenzhen Commercial Bank and Ping An Bank last year with Ping An Insurance (Group) aiming to build up a three-pillar platform of insurance, banking and asset management services.
Cross-sales under the Ping An umbrella is one main advantage for the relatively small player such as the Ping An Bank.
The bank has circulated more than 1 million credit cards so far after launching its credit card business last May.
Jackson said 70 percent of its banking clients were from existing Ping An Group clients.
Retail banking and small and medium banking are two of the businesses the bank is targeting.
Ping An Insurance (Group) has two million small and medium enterprise clients, which makes the bank "directly relevant to SME customers," it said.