Banking analysts sometimes joke that the acid test for whether a mainland city should be considered third tier is if the largest bank on the high street is a branch of the Agricultural Bank of China.
This is a perception Wall Street's finest will be working incredibly hard to displace over coming months.
Agricultural Bank is a deeply troubled institution whose history as a lender to low-income farmers in poorer provinces has saddled it with eye-watering bad debts.
Yesterday, it began auditioning financial advisers to lead a US$20 billion to US$30 billion initial public offering in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
The rural lender has been working on its share sale plans for several years. It will be the last of the four biggest state-owned banks to sell shares to the public. There are good reasons for its laggard status.
'There will have to be an element of putting lipstick on a pig here,' one analyst who follows Agricultural Bank quips, speculating how the lender will present itself to stock market investors.
Every major investment bank in the world is working on its cosmetics skills. The advisers who win roles on the share sale will split a bonanza payday of up to US$650 million, if the rural lender forks out the same 3.5 per cent of deal value that Industrial and Commercial Bank of China lavished on investment banks in its 2006 initial public offering.