Recently, the Global SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) Finance Awards 2023 have been released. Among the four categories, the Postal Savings Bank of China (hereinafter referred to as PSBC) won awards in two categories—Silver Award of SME Financier of the Year Asia and Honorable Mentions of Product Innovation of the Year.

The Global SME Finance Awards are issued by the SME Finance Forum, which was established by the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) under the framework of the Group of Twenty (G20). Launched in 2018, the Global SME Finance Awards honor the achievements made by financial institutions and fintech companies in providing innovative products and services for SME clients, and promote their effective and successful practices globally.

Since its establishment, PSBC has kept exploring services for SMEs and formed the “4321” service model: the four systems of marketing, product, operation and risk control; the three guarantees of system, mechanism and team; the two pillars of technology and corporate culture; and one ecosystem. With its comprehensive and multi-level service model, PSBC has promoted the quality and efficiency increase of microfinance services, and enabled the continuous growth in its inclusive loans to micro and small enterprises (MSEs), thus winning wide recognition.

In order to improve its core professional capability of microfinance services, PSBC has actively built a new model of digital inclusive finance and created the “5D (Digital)” systems, including digital marketing system, digital product system, digital risk control system, digital operation model and digital service method, to promote the digital transformation of microfinance services and address the financing problems of MSEs.

At the same time, PSBC continues to further its professional research on inclusive finance. It has joined hands with Economic Daily to release the “Economic Daily - PSBC Small and Micro-sized Enterprise Operation Index Report” for eight consecutive years, and held four Small and Micro Economic Development Forums, to boost the high quality development of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises.

As of the end of June this year, PSBC’s inclusive loans to MSEs had a balance of 1.35 trillion yuan (about 184.56 billion US dollars), accounting for more than 17 percent of total loans, leading the major state-owned banks in terms of the proportion. PSBC now has 2,084,500 MSE clients with outstanding inclusive loans.