CMB Wealth, the standalone asset management subsidiary of China Merchants Bank (CMB), has grown into the largest in China in the three years since its inception in 2019. Assets under management (AUM) total RMB 2.7 trillion ($3.9 billion).

CMB Wealth leverages the bank’s asset management department. Some 400 financial institutions contribute 25% of this AUM across various types of assets, with CMB Wealth distributing their products through 19 banks to 25 million wealth customers.

The company’s business expansion is supported by its new-generation big data platform that standardises data sourcing, computing and modelling, feeding into over 50 downstream scenarios.

CMB Wealth claims that its platform is the first of its kind in the industry. The combined strength of the bank’s existing data warehouse with the former’s data lake and cloud computing capabilities runs data modelling tailored to meet the needs of its wealth management business.

Wang Guangming, general manager of the company’s digital and technology department said: “Overall, CMB Wealth has achieved 80% of in-house research and development capabilities, and CMB Wealth is also the only wealth subsidiary that completely operates on cloud.”

Since the launch of the platform, the company has increased effectiveness in both the backend and frontend; 1,198 mandates per month have been tagged for development and 252 mandates per month for operation.

Portfolio valuation that used to take half a day now takes 10 minutes. To-to market time for new products has been reduced from three-to-six months to one-to-two months.

New products have been designed by integrating alternative data sources like satellite data. One example is the CSI-CMB Wealth Management Luminous ESG Index, which has had an annualised return of 15.8% since its launch in 2020.

To ensure compliance with external and internal regulations, CMB Wealth also constructed a compliance and risk management platform. The platform leverages middle-platform data results and streams them to the transaction platform to provide real-time screening and compliance checks for each transaction. Wang claims that CMB Wealth is a pioneer in the process. By the end of 2022, the platform had introduced more than 1,100 products, generating over four million transactions and an average reach of 5,000 screen views per day.