La réduction de la marge d'intérêt nette s'est atténuée, la nouvelle équipe de Zhejiang Merchants Bank explique en détail la voie pour stabiliser la marge d'intérêt, en mettant l'accent sur le développement des activités intermédiaires à faible capital.

Finance Society News March 31 — (Reporter Guo Zishuo) On March 31, Zheshang Bank (601916.SH) held its 2025 performance briefing, marking its first public appearance after the new management team adjustments.

The net interest margin decline has significantly narrowed, and the standards for identifying ineffective and low-efficiency assets will become stricter in the future.

At the performance briefing, Zhuoshang Bank’s designated President Lu Linhua focused on responding to market concerns about the interest margin performance. In 2025, the bank’s net interest margin is projected to be 1.60%, a year-on-year decrease of about 11 basis points, compared to a 20 basis point decline in 2023 and a 30 basis point decline in 2024, with the decline clearly narrowing.

Lu Linhua stated that the narrowing of the net interest margin decline is mainly due to three efforts: first, strengthening pricing management for customers to curb the rapid decline in asset deployment prices; second, continuously managing the net interest margin during the process by establishing a full-process control mechanism from expectations, decomposition, monitoring to evaluation; third, optimizing the asset structure by increasing efforts to revitalize existing assets and strictly identifying ineffective and low-efficiency assets. “The standards for identification will only become stricter in the future,” he said.

He also pointed out that the bank is gradually exiting high-yield assets previously invested in. Under a low-risk, balanced-yield strategy, the yields of newly invested assets have decreased, and short-term net interest margins will still be under pressure. However, in the long run, as the “anti-involution” deepens, inflation expectations moderately rebound, and the cost of liabilities enters a downward channel, the bank’s net interest margin is expected to gradually stabilize.

To “eliminate unnecessary costs,” focus on developing light capital and high-sticky intermediary businesses.

Looking ahead to 2026, Lu Linhua said that Zheshang Bank will exert efforts from both assets and liabilities to fully stabilize the net interest margin, and on this basis, expand sources of intermediary business income to ensure steady and sustainable revenue. Regarding profits, the bank will continue to promote comprehensive risk and cost control, adhere to frugality, and “eliminate unnecessary costs.”

In terms of intermediary businesses, Lu Linhua revealed that the bank is implementing a three-year plan to increase intermediary income, changing the previous model reliant on asset deployment and credit expansion to drive intermediary income, focusing on developing settlement, agency sales, custody, and other light-capital, high-sticky intermediary businesses while strengthening revenue and expenditure linkage and optimizing the structure.

Regarding future customer strategies, Lu Linhua clarified that the bank will focus on two major customer groups: corporate clients, focusing on the new Zheshang group, and retail clients, mainly serving the middle class, expanding the service scale for the middle-income population in the “olive-shaped” society. The goal is to keep the non-performing net generation rate of new corporate business within 0.5%. He emphasized, “A bank that cannot control risks well during the cycle will not see spring.”

In response to the hot issue of whether there will be a loss of fixed-term deposits after maturity, Luo Feng, member of the bank’s Party Committee, Vice President, and Secretary of the Board of Directors, responded that by 2025, some of the bank’s existing fixed-term deposits will mature, and the overall fund retention rate will remain high, with most maturing funds staying within the system. “The loss is precisely some high-interest deposits that the bank does not want. This situation is basically consistent with other banks,” Luo Feng said.