Every control a bank places between a rural customer and her own money is a decision, and I hold my operations team to explaining it, timing it and undoing it when it is wrong.
I am vice president and chief operating officer of Xuantang Rural Commercial Bank, formed in November 2023 when eleven county-level rural banks and credit cooperatives in one prefecture of central China became a single legal entity. At December 2025 the bank held RMB 214 billion of assets and RMB 182 billion of deposits, served 5.1 million personal customers through 318 outlets and 2,140 village service points, and employed 7,300 people. I am responsible for counter operations, centralised processing, payments and clearing, cash logistics, the customer service centre, fraud operations and the shape of the outlet network. I report to our president and I am not a director of the bank.
I began as a teller in Wuhan in July 1998, the month the Yangtze floods reached the city, at Tongze Commercial Bank, a national joint-stock bank. I spent sixteen years there, the last six building its centralised operations centre in Shanghai. I then ran operations, fraud control and collections at Ruiqiao Consumer Finance Company in Chongqing. In 2019 I came home to Dongpu county, where my father had kept the ledgers of the rural credit cooperative, to run operations at Dongpu Rural Commercial Bank, the largest of the institutions that later merged into Xuantang.
Most of our depositors are farmers, small traders and retired people; 1.4 million customers are over sixty and hold 44% of personal deposits. That shapes the questions I work on. How do eleven banks with eleven sets of habits become one operation without stranding a counter clerk in a township? How should a bank stop telecom fraud without freezing the wages of a migrant worker who has done nothing wrong? Which outlets can close, and how do we know before the first pension day? My answers have cost the bank savings it planned to make, and I have recorded where they did.
Three working days to release a wrongly restricted account
In early 2024 a customer whose account our own monitoring rules had restricted waited a median nineteen days for a review. We built a review team, video verification and a release standard. By 2025 the median was three working days, and 0.4% of released accounts were later found to have been misused.
Thirty-eight closures where the plan proposed sixty-one
After the merger I tested every proposed closure against pension-day queues and bus journeys for customers over sixty-five. We closed 38 overlapping outlets, kept 12 loss-making single outlets, moved 11 to part-week hours and gave up about RMB 31 million of the annual saving in the plan.
One back office from eleven, on three sites
We merged eleven back offices of about 1,020 people into three processing sites of 610, moving 410 colleagues into fraud review, credit operations, customer service and counters. The median wait for a counter authorisation fell from 7 minutes 40 seconds to 1 minute 50 seconds.
Small-business loans in eight working days
By moving document checks, contracts and collateral registration out of the county branches, we cut median turnaround for small-business and farm loans from twenty-one working days to eight. Credit decisions stayed with county loan officers and the chief risk officer's approval chain.
Current focus
Two pieces of work will occupy most of my 2027. The first is extending our 2,140 village service points from cash withdrawals and balance enquiries to simple assisted transfers, without turning village shopkeepers into the weakest point in our fraud controls. The second is the last stage of processing consolidation: retiring the forms and cut-off times that still differ by predecessor county, nearly three years after the merger.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking another executive role. With the approval of our board and president, I would consider one independent directorship at a company outside banking whose customers are rural or older, and I accept a small number of advisory and speaking conversations each year on bank operations, fraud controls and service for older customers.