The Asian banking giant has added to its roster of partnerships with Western firms through a pact with France's Societe Generale. The agreement embraces areas including wealth management.

Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank by assets, has added to its roster of partnerships with Western firms through a memorandum of understanding with France’s Societe Generale. The MoU embraces areas including wealth management.

“Societe Generale and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Limited today (Monday) announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding in Beijing on a range of potential areas of mutual cooperation, within which both banks will leverage their international and domestic assets to further strengthen and deepen their cooperation,” the banks said in a statement.

Under the agreement, the banks will “fully collaborate” on cross cash management and international payments, corporate lending and syndicated loans, investment banking (mergers and acquisitions, equity capital markets, debt capital markets and other advisory and capital-raising activities), wealth and asset management, custodian services, and the distribution of products, in particular wealth and asset management products, they said.

Last October, ICBC and Standard Life, the UK life insurance and investment house, signed an agreement to work together to identify opportunities for the benefit of both businesses in China, Hong Kong and the UK. In August last year, Manulife (International), part of the Manulife Financial group of companies, formed a strategic bancassurance alliance in Macau with ICBC. The alliance enabled Manulife to distribute its insurance and retirement portfolios to ICBC customers.

Such an MoU suggests that while Societe Generale no longer has a private banking presence in Asia after selling its Singapore-headquartered Asian private bank last March to DBS, it continues to promote wealth management offerings.

In the statement yesterday, ICBC and Societe Generale said “both banks are committed to expand collaboration and further exchange within a wide range of initiatives that draw on each other’s strengths to generate new opportunities in the markets of France and China, as well as more generally Europe, Americas and Asia-Pacific”.

Such a MoU also signals how Chinese banks are keen to capitalise on the growing stature of the renminbi as a global reserve currency.