Background

The customer is a futures brokerage. Hedging and risk-management services for real-economy companies are a priority business. The clients are companies that produce, process or consume the commodities behind futures products, known in the industry as industrial clients. Each branch develops and maintains industrial clients in its own territory.

Problems in client development

  • Each futures product corresponds to a supply chain. For copper, the downstream includes wire and cable, copper tube, copper foil and electric motors, and the producers in each industry have to be identified one by one.
  • An industrial client's need for services relates to how much raw material it uses, and public directories do not reflect production scale.
  • Branches work by territory, so target companies have to be located down to the city and county.

The approach

Mapping companies along the chain. For each product, the team lists upstream and downstream product terms and searches for producers and processors by main products and the four-level industry classification. The full registered business scope is indexed, and synonym expansion covers different names for the same product.

Segmenting by size. Insured headcount, registered capital and paid-in capital can be filtered by range to separate companies by size and set service priorities.

Assigning by territory. Administrative divisions cover province, city and county, overlaid with industrial clusters and development zones, so lists can be split directly by branch territory.

Understanding a company before a visit. Staff run an AI deep dive on a target company to learn its main products, types of downstream customers and size, and prepare the conversation accordingly.

Contacting the person in charge. Staff filter for factories with direct contact details of the owner or senior managers and arrange visits directly.

How it is used

Headquarters builds and regularly updates a company list for each product chain. Branches claim and follow up companies in their territory from that list. Exported companies are flagged, which avoids duplicate assignment.

Where it applies

The same approach suits financial institutions that serve manufacturing companies, including futures brokerages, risk-management subsidiaries and supply-chain finance providers.

The company name is withheld and no customer operating data is disclosed.