Ping An Bank President: "Seeing the dawn at the end of the tunnel"

Ask AI · What other undisclosed challenges still lie ahead in Ping An Bank’s reform’s “deep-water zone”?

Ping An Bank’s new performance highlights and annual report release event—after a period of rapid expansion followed by a deep transformation—have attracted widespread attention.

At the Ping An Bank 2025 annual report performance briefing held on the afternoon of March 23, 2026, more than 70 media outlets and over 50 investment institutions attended the event, including researchers from the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center. Online participating investors numbered as many as 210k, setting a new record for the bank in terms of online attendees in recent years. Why was the Ping An Bank annual report briefing so popular?

Since 2011, when the former Shenzhen Development Bank and the former Ping An Bank kicked off their merger plan to form a new Ping An Bank, it has been 15 years. Over the past 15 years, Ping An Bank’s asset size, operating income, and outstanding loan balance have all posted the highest average annual growth rates among comparable listed peer banks. Its asset size—rising from 1.25 trillion yuan in 2011, when it was first consolidated on a combined basis, to nearly 6 trillion yuan by the end of 2025—represents the fastest “scale” development speed among joint-stock commercial banks over that period.

But since 2023, it has also been an undeniable fact that Ping An Bank’s operating income growth has slowed. In particular, starting from 2023, operating income has declined for a third consecutive year, with a cumulative drop of 27%. In 2025 alone, the bank’s operating income was only 131.4 billion yuan, down 10% year over year—one of the weakest performances among joint-stock banks. At the same time, after major organizational-structure reforms—completing the “abolition of the business unit system”—Ping An Bank has firmly advanced the tasks related to its strategic reforms and pushed them through to implementation. (See “Under the burden of responsibilities in adverse conditions, Ping An Bank’s major reshuffling—can performance be boosted again?” and “Ping An Bank’s retail business has already ‘stemmed the bleeding’; escaping the predicament still requires resolve.”)

Between rises and falls, how does top management set the tone for 2026? Ping An Bank’s President Ji Guangheng said: “In 2026, our operating goal is to ‘return to growth.’ More than 70% of Ping An Bank’s reform tasks have been completed, and the strategic reforms have begun to show results. With the clearing of existing inventory, bad debts reaching their bottom, and a better balance among quantity, price, and risk premiums, we can already see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

How to “return to growth”? Management provided a detailed explanation across multiple dimensions. The proactive adjustment in the retail business is nearing completion. Wang Jun, Executive Vice President and Assistant President in charge of retail at Ping An Bank, predicted that in 2026, the bank’s retail business revenue and profits will further improve. When responding to questions from researchers at the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center, Fang Weihao, Deputy President, said Ping An Bank has already built a top-down, three-dimensional operating system for technology and finance, which is the breakthrough point of the reform.

Micro-adjustments to the Head Office structure

As in every annual performance briefing over the past three years, Ji Guangheng, along with members of his team and more than a dozen leaders of first-level departments, appeared. Researchers at the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center noticed that, compared with a year earlier, there were many “new faces” among Ping An Bank’s management attending this meeting. Specifically, the two senior executives at the level in charge of corporate and retail businesses have been replaced: Fang Weihao now handles corporate business, while Assistant President Wang Jun handles retail business. Meanwhile, multiple first-level department general managers across segments such as retail and risk control also made their debut “for the first time.”

Ping An Bank President Ji Guangheng (photo provided by interviewee)

The bank’s latest organizational chart disclosed in Ping An Bank’s 2025 annual report shows that, while keeping the total number of first-level departments at 17 unchanged, the composition of first-level departments changed with a “one increase, one decrease.” In particular, within the risk control segment, a “Credit Product Center” was added as a first-level department. Within the retail segment, the former “Private Banking Wealth Product Innovation Department” was merged into the “Private Banking Wealth Department.”

What is the rationale behind the organizational adjustments? Researchers at the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center learned that the main purpose of creating the former was to better serve the bank’s intermediary-income business. The latter, in practice, was the former “Insurance Finance Business Department.” After its merger with the “Private Wealth Department,” it would better serve the bank’s private-banking business with comprehensive financial services. The annual report shows that in 2025, Ping An Bank’s agency personal insurance premium volume increased by 35.3% year over year, agency personal insurance income reached 1.29 billion yuan, up 53.3% year over year. Additional volume accounted for 65% of the increase in the bank’s agency and fee income, making it an important source of intermediary business income.

Retail: bottoming out and stabilizing

Personal insurance agency business is only a small part of Ping An Bank’s many retail lines. The bank’s 2025 annual report shows that the retail business’s core indicators stabilizing and ceasing their decline became a major highlight of the annual report.

In 2025, Ping An Bank’s retail financial business generated net profit of 210k yuan, an increase of 12.5k yuan year over year. Against the backdrop that the bank’s full-year net profit was down 60k yuan year over year and saw negative growth for two consecutive years, this metric is especially precious.

Wang Jun said the retail business turning point can be reflected in four dimensions: first, retail asset quality continues to improve. In 2025, the year-over-year decline in personal loan delinquency rate was 0.16%, the first time it has fallen since 2020. Second, the retail business scale stops declining and stabilizes. At the end of 2025, although the outstanding balance of personal loans declined by 2.25% year over year, the rate of decline narrowed by 8.3 percentage points compared with 2024. In particular, in the second half of 2025, the personal-loan balance recovered quarter over quarter by 1.3 billion yuan, showing that the proactive adjustment on the credit side is close to completion. Meanwhile, based on the first-half year-over-year contraction in credit card business scale, the second half achieved positive growth of 10.6 billion yuan, and the bank’s installment and revolving assets grew steadily for the full year.

Third, the structure of bank-managed assets is further optimized. Among them, the average daily proportion of demand deposits increased by 2.3 percentage points from the beginning of the year, while the interest rate paid on interest-bearing liabilities fell by 36 basis points. Fourth, fee income from large wealth management grew 15.8% year over year, driving a sharp narrowing of the year-over-year decline in retail business revenue by 12.4 percentage points.

“As our risk clearance is completed and our customer base structure is optimized, together with the year-over-year decline in corporate impairment losses, it has driven a rebound in retail net profit growth. In 2026, we preliminarily judge that retail business revenue and profit will further increase and improve.”

Corporate business launches reform

While retail transformation is approaching “the light at the end of the tunnel,” is Ping An Bank’s corporate business—which President Ji Guangheng has assigned the task of driving growth across the bank—healthy?

The annual report shows that at the end of 2025, Ping An Bank’s corporate loans outstanding increased by 3.5% year over year, but the volume of ticket-related businesses with lower yields was reduced by 130 billion yuan. At the same time, Ping An Bank’s corporate loan delinquency ratio rose by 0.17 percentage points from the beginning of the year to 0.87%, increasing for three consecutive years, but it still remains at a relatively good level among joint-stock banks.

Fang Weihao said: “2025 is the first year for implementing the pilot phase of Ping An Bank’s corporate reform plan. Our overall strategy remains to adhere to doing things ‘more precisely’—to make customers more precise, industries more precise, and products more precise. And among them, making industries more precise is also an important aspect of Ping An Bank’s corporate reform plan pilot.”

Fang Weihao further explained that by coordinating with the risk control department and following the pathway of industry direction—industry track—industrial chain—industrial segment, the bank identified the segments it believes it can enter first. By the end of 2025, the bank had selected six industries to enter, each supported by refined product policy arrangements that match the industry.

Which industries has Ping An Bank chosen? The annual report shows that among six key sub-sectors—public utilities, digital industries, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and automobiles—the outstanding balance of loans increased by more than 50 billion yuan compared with the end of the previous year, accounting for nearly 90% of the bank’s newly added corporate loan balance. Fang Weihao said: “From the full-year results, for the operating indicators of the industries mentioned above, compared with the average level of general corporate customers, the indicators are higher by dozens of percentage points across five dimensions: quantity, price, risk, customers, and collections.”

In the bank’s corporate banking field, technology and finance has been a research focus of the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center for four consecutive years, and it is also the breakthrough point for Ping An Bank to do well on its “five big articles.”

When answering a question from a researcher at the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center, Fang Weihao said that Ping An Bank has already built a three-dimensional technology-and-finance operating system—from the head office to branches, then to specialized business outlets, and finally to specialized operating teams. In terms of asset allocation, the bank is tilting more toward technology and finance, including subsidizing interest for loans to technology-based enterprises and incorporating technology finance into the branch performance evaluation system.

“In 2026, we will continue to provide more support and increased allocation to manufacturers such as new energy vehicles, new energy, advanced manufacturing, and commercial spaceflight,” Fang Weihao said. “We are also closely watching the next generation of new quality productive forces, including artificial intelligence, brain-computer interfaces, embodied intelligence, and quantum computing—those ‘early sparks’ that are still emerging today—but in the future, they may become hot areas that the banking industry focuses on.”

Branch reforms in progress

Regarding Ping An Bank’s reform, now in its fourth year, Ji Guangheng said frankly that the reform progress has reached 70%, but it has currently entered the “deep-water zone.” Moving forward, more work will need to be continuously refined and advanced step by step. “We hope to resolve historical issues during this process and also form new momentum.”

Which tasks have not been completed, and which areas are the “deep-water zone”—management did not explicitly say. Researchers at the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center compared the task lists management previously laid out at Ping An Bank’s performance briefings over the past three years and found that among the branch offices—medium regions and lagging regions—that Ji Guangheng likened to the “waist” of the human body, management’s reported achievements gave them relatively little emphasis.

In fact, Ji Guangheng places high expectations on the branch reform. When discussing the bank’s key work for 2026, Ji Guangheng said: “Our top six branches account for about 60% of the bank’s revenue. As for the potential of the ‘waist’ branches to come up, it needs some time. This is a problem of uneven development. Therefore, right now, key branches in key regions and key industries must be able to hold up.”

Why is there a requirement that key branches “must be able to hold up”? The annual report shows that as of the end of 2025, Ping An Bank had established 110 branches across the country—covering 29 provinces (autonomous regions/municipalities) excluding Qinghai and Tibet, as well as the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region—along with 1,108 outlets, with the number of outlets optimized by 3.6% year over year. Among them, six head branches in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Nanjing together had total assets of about 2 trillion yuan, accounting for about one-third of the bank’s total assets, but they declined by 2.5% year over year. Only the Guangzhou branch’s asset scale maintained positive year-over-year growth, indicating pressure on the asset growth rate of the bank’s head branches.

At the same time, among branches ranked 7 to 20, 9 saw declines in asset share year over year. Of those, 7 had negative asset scale growth, and in some branches the decline even exceeded 10%. For branches whose asset scale declined, the number of outlets and employees also largely showed negative growth.

But the “waist” tier also includes strong performers. The bank’s asset scales for four branches—Chongqing, Dongguan, Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone, and Hong Kong—grew to levels reaching or exceeding 20%. How to further strengthen the “waist” tier? Ji Guangheng said that in 2025, the head office did relatively well in areas such as pilot projects for branches, resource incentives, and approval efficiency. At the same time, it would connect the rotation of cadres between the head office and branches, placing suitable talent into roles where they can realize more value, and improving cadres’ professional competence and overall management capabilities.

Researchers at the Nanfang Weekend New Finance Research Center noted that since early 2026, Ping An Bank has seen personnel changes in several important branches, including Shanghai, Wuhan, and Haikou. Some head-tier and “waist” branches have “swapped leaders,” and at the same time, deputy presidents across multiple branches have been promoted in concentrated waves.

This bank, which was once aggressive and is now entering the deep-water zone of reform, is an excellent observation sample for the economic transformation cycle. Whether it can achieve a true transformation through three-dimensional, systematic reforms still requires time.

Nanfang Weekend researcher Li Heming

Editors Feng Yu