Questioning AI · What Internal Control Weaknesses Are Exposed by Everbright Bank’s Dislocated Annual Report Data?

Author | Liu Yinping, Xie Meiyu

Editor | Fu Ying

Source | Dujiu Finance

At the end of March, the capital market entered a busy period for annual report disclosures. Everbright Bank’s annual report attracted market attention, not because of its performance, but because of one report, two versions, with data from 40 branches “fighting” each other.

After careful proofreading, it was found that the issue was with the dislocation of branch asset scale data in the A-shares and H-shares annual reports. Although Everbright Bank urgently corrected and released the accurate version, such “basic errors” should not happen in a listed bank with assets exceeding 7 trillion yuan.

More concerning than the data “blunder” is the unhidden performance pressure revealed by this annual report. By 2025, Everbright Bank’s operating income and net profit both declined by over 6% year-on-year, making it one of the few listed banks in A-shares with “double decline” in performance. Narrowing interest spreads continued to squeeze net interest income, and bond market volatility caused significant fair value loss. Meanwhile, regulatory fines kept coming, violations in credit business persisted, and the non-performing asset ratio quietly increased.

However, in wealth management transformation and cost control, Everbright Bank still shows some resilience, with related business income maintaining rapid growth. Especially under the new asset management regulations, in a market environment where the scale of wealth management products grew slowly, Everbright Bank’s wealth management scale increased significantly by 21.66%, with income soaring over 60%, becoming a highlight in the financial report.

1

40 Branch Data “Blunder” Corrected Urgently

Everbright Bank is listed both in A+H shares. On the evening of March 30, it disclosed its 2025 annual report on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and also released an earnings announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. As a nationally recognized joint-stock listed bank, its financial report quickly drew public attention after release.

Sharp-eyed investors and media quickly discovered that in the branch asset scale data, Everbright Bank’s two reports showed discrepancies, with 40 out of 47 branches (including head office, credit card center, branches, and Tokyo representative office) having inconsistent data.

This image may be AI-generated

Image source: Canned图库

The data error started with Tianjin Branch. The A-shares report showed Tianjin Branch’s asset scale as 70k yuan, but the H-shares report showed 59.84B yuan—more than 40 billion yuan difference. Several other branches also had mismatched data.

A detailed review revealed that these branches’ scale data had serious dislocation issues. For example, the data for Chongqing Branch in the A-shares report was the same as Nanjing Branch in the H-shares report; Seoul Branch in the A-shares report was the same as Luxembourg Branch in the H-shares report; Shenyang Branch in the A-shares report was the same as Yinchuan Branch in the H-shares report, and so on.

In other words, during the preparation of the financial reports, Everbright Bank made serious formatting or data entry errors, which were not caught or corrected during subsequent proofreading.

Below is a comparison of some branch asset scale data from Everbright Bank’s A-shares and H-shares reports:

Source: Everbright Bank 2025 A-shares and H-shares financial reports

This reveals a clear loophole in the bank’s internal information disclosure review process—since the annual report, as the core document for listed company disclosures, goes through drafting, formatting, and uploading to the exchange, yet lacks an effective cross-check mechanism.

After the “data clash” incident gained attention, Everbright Bank quickly took action. The data for multiple branches in the A-shares report was corrected. On the evening of April 1, around 9 pm, Everbright Bank issued an “Amended Preliminary Performance Data” announcement on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, stating that the corrections did not affect other information in the annual performance announcement. However, some websites still publicly display the uncorrected version.

Everbright Bank was not the only one to have an “annual report blunder.” During the same reporting season, Bank of Communications also made a “typo” error: it mistakenly wrote “distributing 3.247 yuan per 10 shares” as “distributing 3.247 yuan per share,” leading to a misstatement of dividend total by about 258.2 billion yuan. The bank quickly corrected and apologized, stating it would further strengthen the preparation and review of information disclosures to ensure quality.

These consecutive basic errors in disclosure by two major banks have prompted market parties to conduct self-examination and reflection.

2

Revenue and Net Profit “Double Decline”,

Wealth Management Business as a Bright Spot

The “blunder” in the 2025 financial report was not impressive for Everbright Bank, but the operational data in the report also revealed significant performance pressure. In 2025, the bank’s revenue and net profit both declined, with operating income of 126.31B yuan, down 6.72% year-on-year—marking the fourth consecutive year of revenue decline; net profit of 39.14B yuan, down 6.61%.

At the earnings briefing, Liu Yan, Vice President and CFO of Everbright Bank, mainly attributed the performance fluctuation to narrowing net interest margin, bond investment valuation fluctuations, and phased pressure on credit card interest and fee income.

In the context of the industry-wide LPR rate cuts and fee reductions, banks generally face pressure from narrowing spreads and declining intermediary income. Specifically, for Everbright Bank, in 2025, the net interest margin was 1.4%, down 0.14 percentage points year-on-year; net interest income was 92.1B yuan, down 45.65 billion yuan or 4.72%.

A noteworthy detail is that the bank’s net profit mainly “plunged” in the fourth quarter. In the first three quarters of 2025, quarterly net profit attributable to the parent exceeded 12 billion yuan, but in the fourth quarter, it was only 4.57B yuan, a 44.91% decline year-on-year.

In terms of net interest income, the levels in Q4 and the first three quarters of 2025 were not significantly different, with 1.81B yuan, 22.54B yuan, 22.89B yuan, and 23.22 billion yuan respectively; meanwhile, credit impairment losses in the first three quarters totaled 23.45B yuan, but in Q4 alone, it reached 18.84B yuan.

This indicates that the volume of loans and deposits, net interest margin, etc., did not change dramatically between quarters. The main reason for the sharp decline in Q4 net profit was not traditional lending business but increased impairment losses. Over the past two years, Everbright Bank has also adopted this approach—concentrating risk recognition and provisioning at year-end, with large one-time provisions to clear out existing bad loans, aiming for lighter asset quality in the following year.

Image source: Canned图库

Another factor behind the performance decline is that in 2025, Everbright Bank’s interest expense on bonds issued was 17.59B yuan, down 26.11B yuan or 8.72%. According to Liu Yan, this was due to the downward trend in bond market interest rates in 2024, which led to high valuation bases for investment assets; in 2025, rising bond yields caused valuation losses, dragging down other income. Fair value change gains turned from a profit of 2.49B yuan last year to a loss of 5.3B yuan, a difference of nearly 100 billion yuan, which was a major reason for the performance decline, mainly affected by bond market fluctuations.

Additionally, Liu Yan mentioned that Everbright Bank increased efforts in risk resolution and business transformation in 2025, with credit card interest and fee income under phased pressure. In fact, since 2020, the bank’s credit card income has been steadily declining, with data showing that from 2020 to 2023, the bank’s credit card income was 45.38 billion, 44.15 billion, 43.97 billion, and 43.06 billion yuan, respectively—down 4.6%, 2.7%, 0.4%, and 2.1%. The decline was small but trend obvious.

In 2024, credit card income fell below 40 billion yuan, down to 4.37B yuan, a 23% decrease year-on-year; in 2025, it further declined to 33.16B yuan, with transaction volume shrinking from 1.68 trillion yuan in the same period last year to 1.48 trillion yuan.

Faced with shrinking market scale and asset quality pressure, Everbright Bank is also undergoing transformation. Over the past year, the bank completed the shift of credit card operations from direct sales to localized management, establishing the core concept of “returning to consumption fundamentals and returning to branches.” Vice President Qi Ye stated at the performance briefing that the bad loan formation rate of credit cards has stabilized and initial risk management results have been achieved.

Amid the overall downward trend, there are bright spots. In 2025, Everbright Bank’s fee and commission net income was 26.9B yuan, up 6.19%, with wealth management service fee income at 16.8k yuan, up 61.41%, accounting for 30.6%. Wealth management became the most prominent growth point that year. After the implementation of new asset management regulations, the scale of wealth management products slowed, but in 2025, the bank’s wealth management product scale grew by 21.66%, far exceeding the industry average.

Moreover, the bank is also actively controlling costs to ease profit pressure. In 2025, operating expenses decreased by 8.9%, a larger decline than revenue, providing some offset. Liu Yan explicitly stated that 2026 will be a key year for the bank to consolidate its foundation, sticking to differentiated development, building characteristic business advantages, and through increasing income, controlling costs, and strengthening risk management, to stabilize and improve profitability.

3

Asset Quality Under Pressure,

Continued Rise in Non-Performing Loans in Real Estate

Beyond performance pressure, Everbright Bank also faces challenges in compliance and asset quality. Frequent penalties for violations in credit business and rising non-performing loan indicators are notable.

According to public information, since 2025, the total penalties and fines imposed on Everbright Bank’s head office and branches have exceeded 60 million yuan. Large fines mainly focus on anti-money laundering violations, indicating strict regulatory crackdowns on internal control deficiencies. The most common violations involve “three checks” in lending, with penalties mainly targeting branches, exposing weaknesses in credit compliance management.

Branches such as Taizhou, Quanzhou, Longyan, Ningbo, Yancheng, and Nanning Yuanhu Branches have all received fines of over one million yuan for credit violations in 2025, with responsible personnel receiving warnings and fines.

This image may be AI-generated

Image source: Canned图库

In terms of asset quality, Everbright Bank’s overall risk remains controllable, but the non-performing loan ratio broke the four-year steady level of 1.25%, rising to 1.27% in 2025. Non-performing loan balance increased by 3.03% to 14.8k yuan, surpassing 50 billion yuan for the first time; the provision coverage ratio fell by 6.45 percentage points to 174.14%.

The migration rate of suspicious loans reached 69.06%, up 27.53 percentage points, indicating that a large number of already risky loans are accelerating into losses, putting pressure on provisioning and profit erosion.

Corporate loans’ asset quality is affected by two industries: real estate and manufacturing. Among them, real estate loans’ non-performing rate rose to 15.18%, ranking first and up 1.48 percentage points from the previous year; manufacturing risks are also significant, with a non-performing rate of 14.99%, up 1.57 percentage points, becoming another major risk point.

Source: Everbright Bank 2025 Annual Report

Retail non-performing loans are growing even faster. Vice President Qi Ye pointed out at the performance briefing that risks in retail loans mainly involve real estate and credit card sectors, which have been identified as key areas for strengthened management and resolution. This is also reflected in the guarantee methods for non-performing loans, where credit loans account for nearly 30%, ranking first.

Under the pressure on asset quality, in 2025, Everbright Bank disposed of 20.25B yuan of non-performing loans, including write-offs of 6.2B yuan, securitization of 332.9k yuan, and recovered 50.74B yuan through collection.

The “blunder” in the annual report may be a minor episode, but the decline in revenue and net profit, shrinking financial asset values, and rising non-performing loans are the numbers the market is truly watching. Bank President Hao Cheng stated at the performance release that “not only scale, speed, or ranking” matters, but how to improve performance, address internal control, and stabilize asset quality are the real questions the market wants answers to.