Yucheng Technologies Limited (Nasdaq: YTEC), a leading local IT and outsourced service provider to the Chinese banking industry, today announced a significant call center expansion project for the China Construction Bank ("CCB"), one of the top four commercial banks in China.
This expansion will increase China Construction Bank's total number of call center seats from 3,000 at year end 2007 to approximately 7,500. The increased seats will be used to serve rapidly- growing credit card and retail banking customers.
The total contract value is over RMB93 million (approximately US$13.7 million), with the majority of the system integration portion being recognized in the second quarter. The majority of the solution and implementation services associated with this project will be recognized in the third quarter.
"This project is a major expansion of CCB's customer interaction capacity on top of the existing foundation that Yucheng has helped to build from its inception. Yucheng was honored to be the exclusive partner that CCB invited to help plan and execute the expansion," stated Weidong Hong, the CEO of Yucheng.
China Construction Bank is the largest credit card issuer among the top 4 banks. The Bank's total credit cards issued in 2007 increased by 94%, and the total transaction value soared by 94% against 2006. CCB also saw 194% growth in its fee income from intermediary services in 2007. "We are very pleased to be CCB's partner in better servicing its fast-growing customer base," Weidong Hong added.
"Top-tier Chinese banks have been focusing on expanding their customer interaction bandwidth in the past few years. In the next few years these leading banks are expected to shift their focus more to customer care related software, such as CRM and data-mining. For share-holding or regional commercial banks, building their first call center or expansion of existing capacity will continue to dominate their infrastructure investments. As China's number one provider of channel-related solutions including call center and electronic banking, Yucheng is well poised to capture the market opportunities," said Mr. Hong.