Several dozen Chinese and global finance giants and service outsourcing agencies now call a Guangdong financial service zone home, and this says a lot about its success in securing investors in the finance and service outsourcing sectors, local market analysts have said.

"The fact that 67 reputed financial enterprises home and abroad chose the Guangdong High-Tech Service Zone for Financial Institutions as their investment destination by late September speaks for its success," one analyst said.

Analysts attribute the growing glamour of the zone to its positioning and investment climate.

It originally attracted the southern information center of the People's Insurance Co (Group) of China, the business-process outsourcing center for France's Capgemini Group, and the service outsourcing center of IBM.

Those expected in the near future include the data center of Fujitsu (Guangdong) Technology Corp, the financial operations of the Guangdong Development Bank, and the American International Assurance (AIA)'s Asia-Pacific finance center.

The new Fujitsu center, which involves a capital input of about $29.5 million, will become Fujitsu's first world-class data center in China.

The financial operations of the Guangdong Development Bank, which involve an investment of 2.7 billion yuan, will provide a comprehensive back-office service center that integrates information, operations, training, a call center, and credit card center with overall supervision.

The AIA's Asia-Pacific finance center, with a capital input of $80 million, is expected to take over most of the back-office centers and auxiliary services in Guangdong including its phone marketing center and training center.

The zone deals in financial innovation R&D, data processing, real-time call answering, disaster recovery, training, insurance assets management, bankcards, private equity (PE) and venture capital (VC).

It has an outstanding investment climate, favorable geographical location, convenient traffic network, cost advantages, human resources and a competitive IT infrastructure.

Location

The zone is a 15-minute drive from the new Guangzhou railway station and 35 minutes from the city's Baiyun International Airport. It is connected to the Guangzhou-Foshan metro, the first intercity metro in China, with three stops.

And it will take less than one hour to reach Hong Kong when a new express train between Guangzhou and Hong Kong goes into service soon.

Its property costs are only 30 percent of those in Guangzhou while wages and related costs are about 60 percent.

It has plenty of human resources thanks to efforts by the provincial government to promote the integration of Guangzhou and Foshan.

And the zone's services are at least as good as those of any big city when it comes to telecoms and IT, power supplies, public facilities, and other support infrastructure.

(China Daily 10/21/2011 page12)