Management Of Relationship Managers In Commercial Banks

With the on-going progress of the financial globalization and technology, the competition is becoming more and more fierce among domestic banking industry. With the foreign banks swarming into the market, especially after China' s accession in the WTO, domestic commercial banks are faced with precedent pressures and challenges. As a result, the trend generates higher demand for the relationship managers, who are in the frontline of marketing, and the management of them. In order to adapt the fierce competition in the domestic financial market, the relationship manager system was introduced to the country. Although with the development of the market economy and the change of the international environment, relationship managers in commercial banks have begun to seek client resources actively, their business level still stays in deposit marketing and loans etc, which is quite far from the real level of relationship managers. Thus they can only be grouped as quasi-relationship managers. Therefore, the bank community around the world has regarded an in-depth inquiry into the management mode of the relationship managers in commercial banks as a key factor to enhance the competitiveness of banks.As the definition goes, relationship managers are referred as those marketing professionals who develop and deliver banking services to customers, such as developing quality assets, managing high net-worth clients, promoting financial products, organizing deposit, collecting market information, publicising CI, acting as financial planner etc. They are the main force, who provide all-sided modern services to customers and establish brand-new bank-enterprise relationship. The effectivemanagement of relationship managers can promptly enhance the competitiveness of domestic commercial banks, given the fierce economic environment.In the past documentation, some have realised the importance of the management of relationship managers, but most of the research is based on the theoretical studies in the western countries. However, there is certain gap between the real situations. Although some documentation on theoretical study of relationship managers in commercial banks in China are carried out with the real economic environment in the country, most of them are focused on a certain aspect of the relationship managers. In-depth study on relationship managers in commercial banks should be conducted not only on their principal responsibilities, principal qualities and working concepts, but also on their marketing techniques and mode of management. In order to overcome the partiality of traditional theoretical study on relationship managers and the gap issues combined with years' practical working experiences, the author is trying, in this article, to conduct some profound research on the management of relationship managers.Based on elaborating the concept and the develop process of the relationship manager in commercial banks, the article, from three aspects, elucidating the relationship managers: first, the scope of responsibilities of a competent relationship manager should possess; second, the moral quality, business quality, psychological quality, etiquette quality and academic quality; third, the working concepts relationship managers should have: the client-oriented concept, marketing concept, key client comprehensive developing concept, tailor-made product and service concept, financial innovation concept, deepening financial technology concept, risk management concept and teamwork concept. The third part of the article elucidating the marketingtechniques the relationship managers should possess: relationship-developing technique, negotiating technique, service management technique. The fourth part of the article is on the criteria of recruitment, the channel of recruitment, the procedure of recruitment, training mechanism. Base on years' of banking experiences, the author draws the conclusion that the commercial banks in the country should adopt the mini relationship manager group strategy to manage the team of relationship managers.