Baoshang Bank launches online wealth management platform

Baoshang Bank Limited, a joint-equity commercial bank best known for its micro-business finance service, launched an online wealth management platform called Xiaoma Bank on Wednesday amid increasing competition from Internet finance companies.

The newly established platform is the latest attempt by Chinese commercial banks to explore the market for Internet financial products.

"Traditional banks are under huge pressure from the liberalization of interest rates and financial disintermediation. We are making great efforts to maintain our core competence as the Internet finance is changing the financial sector. After more than a year's research, we decided to take our first step in the field of Internet finance by giving more people the opportunity to enjoy individualized wealth-management services that used to target high-end clients only," said Liu Xin, general manager of the strategy development department at Baoshang Bank.

Instead of assessing a client's propensity for risk at bank outlets, Xiaoma Bank offers online risk tolerance assessment to its clients and recommends different portfolio of financial products to different clients according to their characteristics.

At the initial stage of operation, the platform offers two kinds of investment products. The first is debt products whose maturity ranges from 3 to 12 months with an annualized return of 7.5 percent, and the second is money-market funds with a seven-day annualized yield of 4.52 percent.

As the market is still growing, Xiaoma Bank will provide more products, including equity funds and insurances step by step.

To attract young urban dwellers aged between 25 and 40, the platform made it very simple to purchase wealth-management products anytime anywhere and set the investment bar as low as 100 yuan ($16).

"The platform combines the traditional bank's advantages in risk control and loan service with the simplicity and convenience of Internet finance," said Zhang Cheng, general manager of Xiaoma Bank.

He noted that the client's money will be entrusted to a third party and the platform will disclose information of the capital on a regular basis.