October 28th, 2009 –Being one of the members in the first group successfully included in the Electronic Commercial Draft System (ECDS) run by People's Bank, ICBC pioneered the service of electronic commercial draft under its Corporate Internet Banking among domestic banks. All the corporate customers can now use the service for all purposes related to electronic bills.

This new ICBC service of electronic commercial draft under Corporate Internet Banking enables electronic steps of processing a bill all the way from drawing, acceptance, cash-through endorsement, collection and credited into account. All the related funds are cleared in real-time. Information is available for enquiry anytime. The service boosts the processing efficiency of bills by substantial margin. Meanwhile, ICBC's service of electronic commercial draft adopts electronic signature and proven security authentication mechanism to ensure the exclusivity, integrity and security in the process.       

Commercial drafts are increasingly used in China in recent years as shown by the burgeoning business volume and scale. Very often the two parties involved in a transaction very much want to see that paperless electronic commercial draft can be used for payment and settlement one day. People's Bank organized and built the nationwide ECDS in order to push the standard of bank payment and settlement service to another new height and meet the diversified payment needs from the society. Compared to paper commercial drafts, the electronic drafts offer many new features of replacing the use of physical bills by data messages, replacing written or stamped signatures by electronic signatures version, replacing manual delivery by network transmission, and using computerized entries instead of manually written. Electronic bills are not easily lost or damaged. Transactions are fast and convenient. All these are essential elements to drive further the use of commercial draft for payment and settlement.   

According to the ICBC spokesperson from the department concerned, the electronic commercial draft system that ICBC developed and built is based on the overall requirements from People's Bank. The system which is connected to People's Bank system via interface is to offer advanced, convenient, safe and highly-efficient services to all customers. In the next step, ICBC will continue to accelerate its pace in new product innovation in order to deliver even premium services to all corporate customers to use electronic bills.