ICBC has launched five categories of account-based trading products in recent years including account-based precious metals, account-based foreign exchange, account-based energy, account-based basic metals and account-based agricultural products, providing domestic investors with easy access to commodity market investment and trading. As at the end of 2015, ICBC’s  account-based trading service exceeded RMB 2.65 trillion in value and served over 17 million customers.

Though China is a major commodity consumer in the world, Chinese investors have long suffered from the lack of secure and effective investment, trading and hedging channels amid the volatile global markets for foreign exchange, crude oil, basic metals, agricultural products and other commodities. In recent years, ICBC has developed an account-based trading product line with the widest scope among Chinese banks based on market conditions and customer needs. As it just requires counting of shares and does not require physical delivery, account-based trading can both save cost and streamline the trading process for customers.

To improve investor experience, ICBC is persistently enriching the functions and trading channels of account-based trading products. For example, ICBC has added the short positioning (i.e. selling before buying) to account-based foreign exchange to meet customers’ investment demand amid market downtrend and increase the number of tradable currencies to 10, offering more options to customers. The cut-off time for account-based crude oil trading is extended from 03:00 a.m. to 04:00 a.m., allowing customers more time to trade. Account-based crude oil trading totaled more than 300 million barrels and amounted to over RMB 100 billion in 2015. As to trading channels, in addition to internet banking and mobile banking, ICBC creatively introduced ICBC e-investment application that provides market updates as frequently as every four seconds. Also, analysis and plotting tools are provided for 21 important technical indicators as reference for investors to make decisions.