Chinese bank seeks staff to meet expansion

China Construction Bank New Zealand's chairwoman, Dame Jenny Shipley, said staff numbers could double. Photo / Mark Mitchell

China Construction Bank New Zealand is on a recruiting drive as it pushes for a slice of the growing market facilitating trade between this country and the world's second-biggest economy.

The Auckland-based lender - whose Beijing parent has 15,000 branches and almost 300 million customers, including three million corporate clients - gained clearance from the Reserve Bank to operate here last July.

Since then it has secured some top talent previously employed by its Australian-owned competitors.

Lloyd Cartwright, formerly head of financial markets for Westpac in Asia, joined in August as executive general manager of corporate banking and head of treasury.

Andrew Chambers, previously ANZ's head of food and beverage, also joined the bank last year as general manager of commercial banking.

China Construction Bank New Zealand's chairwoman, Dame Jenny Shipley, said the bank now employed 26 people at its central Auckland headquarters, and that number could double over the next two years.

Eight of the 26 were Chinese "expats" whom the bank had deployed from China. The balance was a mix of young, Mandarin-speaking Chinese New Zealanders and experienced staffers recruited from other banks.

The bank's main focus is trade banking - such as facilitating Kiwi firms operating in China and vice versa - and wholesale services like syndicated and bilateral loans.

New Zealand and China are targeting annual two-way trade of $30 billion by 2020. Shipley said the bank was competing with the likes of ANZ, Westpac and BNZ for "a particular profile of customers". "They [the big banks] know we're here."

Asked how much business the bank had secured in its first 10 months of operation, Shipley said: "I'm not going to give you a number but we've got more opportunity than we can manage".

Despite slowing economic growth in China and concerns about its financial system, Shipley remains bullish about the country's prospects.

"The Chinese economy is maturing," she said. "It will have bumps like our economy and others have bumps, but I'm very confident that disposable income [in China] will increase."

China Construction Bank Corporation, the country's second-largest bank, posted a 1.9 per cent rise in first-quarter net profit to 67 billion yuan last week - its slowest first-quarter profit increase in six years.

Analysts have viewed a recent slowdown in earnings growth at all of China's major banks as a sign of the country's economic slowdown putting stress on its banking system.