BOC tipped to open Shanghai headquarters
February 27, 2012 Category Finance, Weekly
The Bank of China (BOC) plans to set up a second headquarters in Shanghai next month, a move seen as bolstering the city’s ambitions to become a global financial center in coming years. The bank, which was founded in Shanghai 100 years ago and currently has a single head office in Beijing, is scheduled to launch the new headquarters at a ceremony on March 20 in the Pudong New Area, the would-be Wall Street of Shanghai. The city has long been China’s foreign-exchange trading center, and several foreign banks, including HSBC, Standard Chartered and Citigroup, have chosen the city as the headquarters for their operations in China. Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng and top financial regulators from Beijing were expected to attend the ceremony in Pudong, where the bank already has a high-rise building bearing its name that now houses its Shanghai branch staff. “Bank of China is the first among the Big Four to have a second head office in Shanghai and it won’t be the last one to do so,” one observer said. “The other three are also on the way, as this is part of the big plan to help Shanghai strengthen its position as the leading financial center in China,” he added. Bank of China, which won special approval to set up a commercial bank from Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, was officially established in Shanghai in 1912 and kept its headquarters on The Bund, the city’s historic waterfront, until 1949 when the new government decided to move the bank’s headquarters to Beijing. Once the Shanghai headquarters of Bank of China was open for business, the bank’s Beijing headquarters would focus more on administrative and management matters, leaving the Shanghai office to have more clout in business-related decision-making, sources told the South China Morning Post.
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