The Bank of East Asia has announced that BEA China, its wholly-owned subsidiary, has opened a data centre in Shanghai, making it the first foreign bank to set up such an establishment, it says.

The state-of-the-art data centre will help BEA China boost its processing capacity and operational efficiency to support its expansion plans into the mainland, it said in a statement earlier this week. The China Banking Regulatory Commission requires all locally-incorporated foreign banks to operate their own domestic data centres before March 2011.

This is complementary to a recent report by financial consulting firm Celent, which reveals that wealth management IT spending worldwide will increase 5 per cent to $3.7 billion this year, as more banks seek to build better quality and up-to-date service in the wake of the financial crisis.

The brand new data centre is located in the Shanghai Financial Information Service Industrial Park in Zhangjiang, Pudong.

The Bank of East Asia is based in Hong Kong.