Italy based UniCredit has been given the go ahead to offer letters of credit (L/Cs), bank guarantees and several more services from a fully-fledged branch on mainland China.

The move has been made possible after the pan-European financial institution received authorisation from the China Banking Regulatory Commission to transform its representative office in Guangzhou into a bank branch.

Service Offering

The new Guangzhou branch will begin by offering foreign currency services, including deposits, loans, factoring and discounting and bond trading.

It will also offer L/Cs and bank guarantees, domestic and international settlements and trading in foreign currency.

Customer base

Unicredit is anticipating customers in its core European markets doing much more business with China.

The bank's core markets are Italy, Austria and southern Germany while UniCredit also has operations in central and eastern Europe.

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