Branch Reconfiguration Practice Through Operations Research in Industrial and Commercial Bank of China

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), the world's largest publicly traded bank as measured by market capitalization, deposit volume, and profitability, has a network of over 16,000 branches. This network is an important core competency and is fundamental to ICBC business development. To keep its leading position in the fast-changing and competitive China market, ICBC needed to reconfigure its branch locations and service capabilities to match the regional economy and customer distribution; therefore, it had to quickly identify new high-potential market areas in which to open branches. ICBC partnered with IBM to customize an operations research-based branch network optimization system, Branch Reconfiguration (BR), which it has implemented in over 40 major cities in China. In a typical major city (e.g., Suzhou), ICBC attributes US $1.04 billion in increased deposits to BR. The BR project is an example of successfully using operations research and management sciences to transform the service channels of a large bank in a manner that will continue to improve the bank's business development and decision making.