A credit cooperative accountant's daughter who runs the back office

My father kept the ledgers of the Dongpu rural credit cooperative from 1979 until he retired in 2004. As a girl I sat in his back office during school holidays while he balanced the day's vouchers on an abacus and then again by hand, because the director would not sign until the two totals agreed. When a farmer came in with a passbook entry he could not explain, my father went through every line with him before he would let anyone call it an error. I did not think of it as operations. I thought of it as my father being stubborn. It took me twenty years of my own work to see that he was treating a control and its explanation as one job.

I studied finance at Qingliu University of Finance and joined Tongze Commercial Bank in Wuhan as a teller in July 1998. The Yangtze was in flood that summer. Customers arrived at our Hankou counter with passbooks that had been under water and seals that had smudged, and they needed their money to repair houses and replace stock. The procedures assumed a dry passbook. Our sub-branch manager set up an exceptions desk, wrote down every judgement we made and who made it, and reviewed the list each evening. I learnt at that desk that an exception handled in the open is safer than a rule everyone quietly works around.

I became a counter supervisor in 2001 and moved to the Wuhan branch's operations department in January 2003. Each outlet then authorised its own large or unusual transactions: a supervisor walked to the counter, checked the voucher and stamped it. In 2006 the branch became the bank's pilot for remote authorisation, in which scanned vouchers went to a central team, and I ran the pilot across twenty-eight outlets. Counter staff disliked it because a stranger in another building was now approving their work, and they were right that the first version was slower. We fixed the queueing, published the waiting time every week and gave counters a direct line to the authorising team. A centralisation is accepted once the counter can see what it gains, and that has shaped every consolidation I have led since.

In July 2008 I moved to Tongze's head office in Shanghai to build a centralised operations centre for the whole bank. Over six years we moved account-opening review, remote authorisation and voucher processing for 640 outlets into regional centres. I finished a part-time MBA at Shenlan School of Management in 2011, mostly in the evenings once the day's backlog had cleared. The lesson I remember best came in 2012, when a cut fibre line isolated the Shanghai centre for five hours and counters in nine branches could not complete large withdrawals. We had designed for efficiency and assumed resilience. Afterwards I insisted on a second site able to run each process, and I have argued for more than one site ever since, usually against a cheaper plan.

In March 2014 I joined Ruiqiao Consumer Finance Company in Chongqing as chief operations officer. I wanted to run the whole chain that touches a customer: the application, the fraud check, the disbursement, the statement, the collection call and the complaint. A fast-growing consumer lender sees those as one system, because a weak application check produces the accounts its collectors later chase. We brought most collections in-house, rewrote the scripts with our compliance team and cut application fraud losses from 0.62% to 0.19% of originations. I also saw how much harm a fraud rule does when it is wrong and nobody is responsible for reversing it.

In 2018 my mother became ill, and I began spending most weekends in Dongpu. Hanqing Zhou, newly appointed president of Dongpu Rural Commercial Bank, asked me to rebuild its operations. I accepted in March 2019 at a little over half my Chongqing salary. The bank had sixty-three outlets, a loyal and ageing customer base and processes that had changed little since my father's time. From 2022 I also led the operations workstream preparing the merger of Dongpu with ten other institutions in the prefecture. When Xuantang Rural Commercial Bank was formed in November 2023, I became its chief operating officer.

The work since then has been to make eleven institutions operate as one bank while keeping faith with customers who never asked for a merger. I have closed outlets and kept others the finance plan wanted closed. I have centralised processing onto three sites rather than one. I have built a review process for accounts restricted by our fraud rules, because a control that cannot be reversed in reasonable time is a cost handed to the customer. I have argued with colleagues I respect, including our chief financial officer and our head of anti-fraud, and lost some of those arguments.

Colleagues would say that I ask for the queue on the worst day rather than the average, that I want a named person responsible for undoing every control we introduce and that I read complaint files myself. I work best with people who write their objections down, and I attach those objections to my papers for the board's committees. I am slower to declare a programme finished than some colleagues would like, and I would rather report an open exception than a closed one that is not.

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