Around midday, the dining hall at Ningkang Nursing Home in Min County, Dingxi City, is filled with the aroma of food and a warm, cozy atmosphere. Elderly residents approach the smart payment terminal and smile at the camera. With a soft "beep," the screen instantly displays their personal information and meal subsidy details. No cash, no phone, no password—the entire process, from identity verification to payment settlement, takes just one or two seconds. This is a vivid example of how the Agricultural Bank of China (ABC) Gansu Branch is leveraging fintech to enhance smart elderly care.
Previously, meal payments at Ningkang Nursing Home relied primarily on cash and personal WeChat transfers. "Daily revenue collection was scattered, and month-end reconciliation was done entirely by manual counting—labor-intensive and prone to errors. We had long hoped to achieve standardized and efficient management, but never found the right solution," said Zheng Wenxiang, the nursing home's director.
After learning about the needs of grassroots elderly care institutions, the ABC Gansu Branch quickly assembled a dedicated service team. After multiple on-site visits and research, they deeply integrated financial services into the full daily operations of the nursing home. Currently, two smart payment terminals have been successfully installed at Ningkang Nursing Home, covering 14 staff members and 75 elderly diners. Now, facial recognition dining makes every transaction clearly traceable, completely resolving the facility's management challenges.
To thoroughly advance the "elderly care finance" initiative, the ABC Gansu Branch has innovatively launched a "Smart Elderly Care 1+N" meal assistance service model. This model centers on meal services and extends into four sub-service categories, precisely meeting diverse elderly care needs. Leveraging the community meal assistance service network, the bank seamlessly integrates convenient services such as social security card activation, pension withdrawals, wealth management, and utility bill auto-payment into the daily lives of the elderly.
In the first half of this year, the bank connected with 35 community meal assistance stations and conducted 50 on-site service sessions. Additionally, all 559 ABC branches across Gansu Province have completed age-friendly renovations, equipped with amenities like priority seating, reading glasses, and first-aid kits, along with dedicated fast-track lanes for senior citizens. As of the end of July this year, the bank's mobile banking platform served 1.4093 million elderly customers aged 60 and above.
From the one-to-two-second convenience of facial recognition payments to a service network covering over a hundred meal assistance points across the province; from solving the challenge of "difficulty cooking" to building a comprehensive life-cycle elderly care financial service system—the ABC Gansu Branch is using finance as its brush to paint a heartwarming picture of "ensuring the elderly are cared for, supported, engaged, and secure" across the vast lands of Gansu.