(Yicai) March 18 -- Citic Group has prepared the way for Zhang Wenwu, a vice president of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, to become the Chinese state-owned financial giant’s new general manager.

Zhang will be appointed deputy secretary of Citic’s Communist Party committee, the Beijing-based firm said recently. The move implies that he will also step in as GM because the committee’s deputy secretary also takes that role after completing a standard onboarding procedure.

Zhang will be the second senior executive to move from ICBC to Citic this year after Zeng Qi, former GM of the bank’s personal finance department, was made deputy GM in January.

Born in 1973, Zhang has worked at ICBC for nearly 30 years, becoming its first VP born after 1970 in July 2020. Before that, he had held other key roles at the lender, including GM of the head office's finance and accounting department, chief financial officer of ICBC-AXA Life Insurance, and VP of the lender’s Liaoning provincial branch.

Former Citic GM Xi Guohua succeeded Zhu Hexin as chairman late last year, while Zhu became a deputy governor of China's central bank and director of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange last November.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev