Twenty-eight years from the Hankou counter to a merged rural bank

Mandate

Make eleven merged institutions operate as one bank: consolidate the back offices, rationalise the outlet network, unify fraud operations and shorten small-business lending without moving credit authority.

Outcomes

• Merged eleven back offices of about 1,020 people into three processing sites of 610; median counter authorisation wait fell from 7 minutes 40 seconds to 1 minute 50 seconds.
• Closed 38 overlapping outlets against a plan of 61, keeping 12 loss-making single outlets; customers' deposits at closed outlets held at 96% after a year.
• Cut the median release time for accounts restricted by the bank's own fraud rules from 19 days to 3 working days; restriction complaints fell from 3,900 to 1,150.
• Reduced median small-business and farm loan turnaround from 21 working days to 8 through a central credit operations unit of 140 people.
• Customer-reported telecom fraud losses fell from RMB 38.6m in 2023 to RMB 14.2m in 2025.

Decisions in context

I became chief operating officer on the day the eleven institutions became one legal entity, having led the operations workstream of the merger preparation from Dongpu since 2022. The first year was about keeping counters open while authorisation limits, forms, cut-off times and cash routines changed underneath them. The second was about the network and the back office: closing duplicate outlets after testing them against pension-day queues, and moving eleven back offices onto three sites so that a flood or a cut cable could not stop the counters. Since then the work has turned to fraud operations and lending: a release standard for accounts our own rules had restricted, and a central credit operations unit that took the paperwork out of county lending while leaving the credit decision local. I present quarterly to the risk management committee and twice a year to the consumer rights protection committee. I am not a director of Xuantang; I sit on the board of Lianfeng Village and Township Bank as Xuantang's nominee.

Reason for the move

Current appointment; completing the last stage of processing consolidation and the extension of village service points.

Mandate

Rebuild an ageing operation: introduce remote authorisation, modernise counter service for older customers, and from 2022 prepare the operations side of the prefecture-wide merger.

Outcomes

• Introduced remote authorisation and central account-opening review across 63 outlets, cutting the median counter authorisation wait from 9 minutes to 2 minutes 30 seconds.
• Reviewed 214,000 dormant and duplicate personal accounts during the countrywide campaign against rented and sold accounts, closing or limiting 61,000 with notice to customers.
• Opened priority counters and large-print forms in every outlet and trained counter staff to intervene in scam transfers; interventions rose from 40 in 2020 to 310 in 2022.
• Wrote the operations integration blueprint for the eleven-way merger, adopted by the preparatory group in 2023.

Decisions in context

I returned to Dongpu county in 2019, when my mother was ill, and joined the bank that had grown out of the credit cooperative where my father kept the ledgers. Hanqing Zhou, newly appointed as president, wanted someone who had run centralised operations at scale. The bank had loyal customers, an average depositor age well above fifty and counter processes that depended on supervisors walking from desk to desk. I introduced remote authorisation, central account-opening review and published waiting times, and I spent more time than I expected on older customers: priority counters, forms they could read and staff trained to notice a customer being coached by telephone. The countrywide campaign against rented and sold accounts, which began in 2020, landed on my desk; we reviewed 214,000 dormant and duplicate accounts. From 2022 I also led the operations workstream preparing the merger, which became the blueprint for Xuantang.

Reason for the move

Dongpu merged with ten other institutions to form Xuantang Rural Commercial Bank, where I was appointed chief operating officer.

Mandate

Build an operation able to grow the loan book fivefold without letting application fraud, collections conduct or complaints grow with it.

Outcomes

• Cut application fraud losses from 0.62% to 0.19% of originations by adding device and identity checks and a manual review queue for retail-partner applications.
• Brought collections in-house, reducing the outsourced share from 70% to 15%, with scripts and call reviews agreed with compliance.
• Reduced complaints per 10,000 active accounts by 46% between 2015 and 2018.
• Created a review route for applicants wrongly declined by fraud rules, answering within five working days.

Decisions in context

I left a large bank for a young consumer lender because I wanted to run the whole chain that touches a customer, from the application to the complaint, rather than one segment of it. Ruiqiao was growing fast through retail partners selling appliances and phones on instalments, and the same speed that built its loan book attracted organised application fraud. My team added identity and device checks and a manual review queue, and cut fraud losses by more than two-thirds. The harder work was collections. Outsourced agencies paid on amounts recovered were producing complaints and, in some cases, conduct I was not prepared to defend. We brought most collections in-house and wrote the scripts with compliance. I also learnt that a fraud rule which declines an honest applicant has a cost, and built a route for those applicants to be heard. I left in December 2018 to be near my mother.

Reason for the move

Returned to Dongpu county for family reasons and to rebuild operations at Dongpu Rural Commercial Bank.

Mandate

Design and roll out centralised back-office processing, remote authorisation and account-opening review for the bank's branch network.

Outcomes

• Moved remote authorisation, account-opening review and voucher processing for 640 outlets in 22 branches into three regional centres.
• Reduced back-office staff per outlet by about 40%, with most colleagues redeployed into counter, sales and service roles.
• Introduced a second site for every process after a five-hour fibre outage at the Shanghai centre in 2012 stalled counters in nine branches.
• Cut the voucher error rate in centralised branches from 2.1% to 0.6%.

Decisions in context

After the Wuhan pilot showed that remote authorisation could work, head office asked me to build it for the whole bank. Over six years we designed the processes, built three regional centres and moved 640 outlets onto them, branch by branch. I learnt how to plan a migration, how to keep a counter working while its back office disappeared and how to redeploy people whose work had moved elsewhere. I also completed a part-time MBA. The defining event was an outage in 2012, when a single 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. I spent the following year giving every process a second site and testing the switch. When the rollout was complete, I wanted to run a whole customer operation rather than its back office.

Reason for the move

Joined Ruiqiao Consumer Finance Company to run an end-to-end operation including fraud control and collections.

Mandate

Run the branch's operations department and, from 2006, pilot remote authorisation for the bank.

Outcomes

• Ran the bank's first remote authorisation pilot across 28 outlets in 2006–2007.
• Cut the median counter authorisation wait in the pilot from 6 minutes to 2 minutes after redesigning the queue.
• Published weekly waiting times by outlet, which became standard across the bank.
• Halved cash-shortage incidents at counters by changing end-of-day balancing routines.

Decisions in context

I moved from the counter into the branch operations department as a deputy manager and became its manager in 2005. The department set procedures for twenty-eight outlets, checked their vouchers and handled the exceptions they could not resolve. In 2006 head office chose Wuhan to pilot remote authorisation. The first weeks were difficult: counters waited longer than before, and supervisors felt that their judgement had been taken from them by people they had never met. I spent much of that year at counters, watching the queue, and redesigned the routing so that urgent items reached an authoriser first. I also began publishing the waiting time for every outlet each week, which turned an argument about feelings into one about numbers. By the end of 2007 the pilot was faster than the old process, and head office asked me to build the same thing for the bank.

Reason for the move

Asked to build the head office centralised operations centre in Shanghai.

Mandate

Serve customers at the counter, then supervise the counter team and authorise transactions within the sub-branch's limits.

Outcomes

• Worked the exceptions desk for flood-damaged passbooks and seals in the summer of 1998.
• Became counter supervisor within three years.
• Reduced end-of-day balancing time by about forty minutes by changing how teller shifts handed over.
• Trained four tellers who later became counter supervisors.

Decisions in context

I arrived at the Hankou counter in July 1998, a month after graduating, just as the Yangtze floods reached Wuhan. For weeks we served customers whose passbooks had been under water and whose seals no longer matched our specimen cards. Our sub-branch manager set up an exceptions desk, recorded every judgement and reviewed it each evening, and I spent much of that summer at the desk. It taught me that exceptions are safer handled in the open than hidden. After the floods I learnt the ordinary craft of the counter: cash, vouchers, balancing and the customers who came every week. I became counter supervisor in 2001, responsible for nine tellers and for authorising transactions within the sub-branch's limits. That job made me notice how much of a supervisor's day went on walking between desks to stamp vouchers, the problem I later spent ten years solving.

Reason for the move

Moved into the Wuhan branch operations department.