Beijing, June 10: After the establishment of a nation-wide banking credit registration and consulting system, China has averted potentially 'risky' loans worth over USD seven billion in just eight months as part of the effort to drastically cut the non performing loans in country's banking system, the central bank has said. From September 2002 to April 2003, the newly-established system has helped deny potentially risky loans of 58.4 billion yuan (7.07 billion US dollars), the People's Bank of China (PBOC) said.
A PBOC spokesman said that important progress has been made in establishing a nation-wide banking credit registration and consulting system, for which the apex bank had started preparations in 1997.
Now the system had connected all major cities above prefecture level by the end of last year, 'China Daily' quoted the PBOC spokesman as saying.

By the end of May this year, about four million borrowers, borrowing a total of 11.2 trillion yuan (USD 1.35 trillion) or 79 per cent of the country's total outstanding loans by nearly four million borrowers were recorded in the system.
Statistics from the central bank showed that by the end of last May, more than 60,000 financial institutions had used the system, with monthly inquiries of over 780,000 on average, twice as many as the same period last year.
He said that the Central Bank made it mandatory for all financial institutions to transmit their credit information to the Central Bank's data bank via a computer network, and financial institutions could inquire about their client's credit status through the data bank, so as to prevent credit risks. Bureau Report