Abstract

Case (A):

This case describes multiple open banking initiatives made by China Construction Bank, ShenZhen (CCB-SZ) between 2016 and 2018 in an effort to remain competitive in the retail customer market against online financial services provided by big tech companies such as BATJ (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and JingDong), in China. In particular, CCB-SZ was facing severe competition from mobile payment technologies provided by Alipay and WeChat Pay in individuals’ and SMEs’ payment markets, which were traditionally underserved by incumbent banks. With new regulations enacted in 2016 to encourage incumbent banks to provide online financial services to individuals and SMEs, especially through mobile phones, CCB-SZ made a number of efforts to regain some of the lost territory, including utilizing its long-term relationship with large enterprises as a bridge to reach their customers, collaborating with existing and popular apps, and being creative in terms of offering innovative payment services and redesigning the corresponding business process. Its open banking strategy was to break down its financial services into smaller units and embed them into customers’ daily financial needs, wherever and whenever they arose. Such efforts put CCB-SZ back on the playing field of mobile payment, as it was able to catch up with nonbank mobile payment solutions and maintain a similar growth rate after 2016. However, the nonbank payment providers had multiple advantages over incumbent banks, such as better technology, more data, a larger customer base, and less regulation. Hence, the future of incumbent banks’ open banking strategy remained unclear.

Case (B):

After initial success, CCB-SZ continued its open banking journey by building a more integrated open banking platform in 2019. The platform enabled integration of e-accounts, consolidated payments, contactless payments, a credit card manager, a fee calculator, and other management functions for its open banking projects. CCB-SZ also continued expanding into more service areas, including smart city, smart medical platform, consumer rights, supply chain loans, SMEs quick loan approval, etc. Despite these efforts and achievements, the overall development of open banking projects by CCB-SZ was not able to maintain an upward trajectory, partly due to the regulatory limits that PBOC (the People's Bank of China or central bank) placed on the e-accounts that incumbent banks are allowed to offer to their customers. Meanwhile, BATJ (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and JingDong) and fintech companies continued advancing into the financial sector. To secure its position in the mobile payment markets, CCB actively sought out other strategies such as creating separate entities that focused on fintech; digitalization of the entire backend operation; and cultivating technical manpower. These efforts allowed CCB-SZ to respond quickly to the COVID-19 pandemic by offering many new financial services online, such as “green pass quick loan”, “smart community”, and “grocery shopping.”

Learning Objectives

Case (A):

1. - Describe the difficulties that CCB-SZ was facing in 2016.
2. - Understand why Alipay and WeChat Pay posed such a big threat to incumbent banks in China.
3. - Distinguish between disruptive technologies and big-bang disruption.
4. - Understand how fintech affects competition in the banking industry.
5. - Describe the open banking strategies that CCB-SZ adopted to compete in the retail customer market.
6. - Understand the value of higher-level strategic support needed for the success of an innovation strategy.

Case (B):

1. - Understand that in order to support the open banking strategy, incumbent banks need support from multiple perspectives, including but not limited to, technical, organizational, regulatory, and technical manpower.
2. - Be aware of the backend technical transformation needed in order to support full scale open banking initiatives.
3. - Understand the importance of providing diversified fintech products and services.