Zhu Min, Bank of China: What China’s banks have learned from the crisis

Q: The financial crisis has led most of the world’s financial institutions to re-examine their risk management procedures. As you look to continue reforms at Bank of China, what can be learned from the problems others have faced?

A: We were to a certain degree immune from the crisis not because we had better risk management but because we had a more vanilla business model focusing on loans—

Q: But there were some losses, of around $1 billion. Did your strategic investors RBS and UBS influence your decision to invest in sub-prime CDOs?

A: No, I don’t think so. Only 2.37% of our total investment portfolio at the start of the crisis was in sub-prime related assets. This has been a great learning experience for us, during the past 18 months we have completely rebuilt our market risk management system. We have seen some issues in the...