Trillion-dollar public fund merger game: Hua'an executives fully finalized, HaiFutong vice president transitions to general manager

Against the backdrop of the major integration of the parent company Guotai Haitong Securities, two of its public fund subsidiaries—Hu’an Fund and Haifu Fund—have recently seen changes in senior management.

Within less than a year, Hu’an Fund has completed a comprehensive replacement of top executives, including the chairman and general manager, while Haifu Fund parted ways with a vice president at the end of last month.

At present, the restructuring plan between Hu’an Fund and Haifu Fund is still under discussion, but the new leadership team at Hu’an Fund has already been put in place in advance. Chairman Xu Yong’s strategic vision and background in pension finance; General Manager Fang Yitian’s experience in proactively breaking through in equities; and Chief Market Officer Yan Tao’s expertise in market expansion—this “puzzle” of executive backgrounds appears to align deftly with the coordination capability needed for a trillion-yuan-level merger.

Hu’an Fund’s latest executive appointments are finalized, completing the new team lineup

On April 29, 2026, Hu’an Fund issued an announcement stating that Fang Yitian officially took office as the company’s general manager. The former general manager, Zhang Xiaoling, stepped down due to age; on the same day, Yan Tao was appointed Chief Market Officer.

With this, the new executive team led by Chairman Xu Yong and General Manager Fang Yitian has been assembled, and a nearly one-year-long power transition has formally come to an end.

This round of executive changes also traces back to July last year. At that time, Xu Yong, then the former general manager of China Merchants Fund, took over as the Party Secretary of Hu’an Fund in place of Zhu Xuehua, and by the end of August he was officially elected as the company’s chairman. Xu Yong’s move to Hu’an Fund is seen as another career leap for a veteran in pension and insurance asset management.

The handover of the general manager role followed shortly after. On April 22, 2026, Fang Yitian—former chairman of Wanjia Fund—officially took office as the deputy Party Secretary of Hu’an Fund and was nominated as general manager and director. He officially assumed these roles on April 29.

Fang Yitian’s professional career spans securities, regulation, and public fund businesses. He has worked at institutions including Shanghai Financial Securities Company, the China Securities Regulatory Commission system, and Shanghai Stock Exchange Information Network Co., Ltd., combining hands-on experience on the front lines with a top-level regulatory perspective.

It is understood that Fang Yitian is particularly skilled at driving full-category layout. During his tenure at Wanjia Fund, the scale of money market funds grew by nearly 95 times; the ETF business developed from zero to 24 products; and breakthroughs were also achieved in businesses such as QDII and FOF.

Chief Market Officer Yan Tao has extensive experience in pensions and alternative investments. He previously worked at Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, and from August 2007 to March 2026, he worked at Yangtze Pension Insurance, serving in roles such as Office General Manager, head of Human Resources, head of the Party Office and the Supervisory Office, General Manager of the Shanghai Pension Headquarters, General Manager of the Alternative Investment Management Center, Company Market Director, Assistant to the Company General Manager, and Chief Market Officer.

In addition, industry research has noted that the “Chief Market Officer” position is not a common standard in the public fund industry, but it has already formed a certain convention among medium and large fund companies. Within the industry, this role is often interpreted as Chief Marketing Officer—an front-office position responsible directly for revenue and growth, managing the sales and marketing teams and taking responsibility for performance assessment targets.

By establishing the Chief Market Officer role this time, Hu’an Fund may be signaling an upgrade of its market function—from the traditional model of a shared division under a deputy general manager—to a more focused chief-officer model with greater independent strategic standing. Notably, Yan Tao and Chairman Xu Yong both have prior experience working together at Yangtze Pension Insurance.

A once-dominant leader turning around, with hidden concerns under the halo of scale

As one of the “Top Ten” long-standing public fund companies, Hu’an Fund also has a very strong shareholder background. Guotai Haitong Securities holds 51%, Guotai Junan Investment Management Co., Ltd. holds 20%, Shanghai Industrial Investment Group and Shanghai Jinjiang International Investment Management each hold 12%, and Shanghai Shangguo Investment Management Co., Ltd. holds 5%. The ultimate controller is Shanghai International Group.

Backed by its shareholders, Hu’an Fund issued the first domestic open-ended fund, “Hu’an Innovation,” in 2001, and at one time was among the rule-setters in areas such as product design and the investment research system. In 2002, Hu’an launched the Shanghai SSE 180 Index Enhanced Fund, which was the first open-ended index fund in China. In its early years, Hu’an’s fund management scale consistently ranked among the top five in the industry.

From the perspective of recent scale growth, although Hu’an Fund ranks high, the quality of its growth has been relatively average.

As of the end of Q1 2026, Hu’an Fund’s public funds under management totaled 8050.86 billion yuan, ranking 16th among 164 public fund managers. Looking over a longer period, when Zhu Xuehua took office in 2014, Hu’an Fund’s public fund management scale was only about 639.56 billion yuan.

By the end of 2025, the company’s non-cash fund scale reached 5300.8 billion yuan, up more than 28% year-on-year, and the total asset management scale hit the highest level since the company’s establishment.

It is not difficult to see that Hu’an Fund’s scale growth relies heavily on fixed-income products. From 2021 to mid-2025, Hu’an Fund’s bond fund scale increased from 1198.44 billion yuan to 1597.05 billion yuan; its money market fund scale rose from 2145.69 billion yuan to 3038.58 billion yuan—up 33.26% and 41.61%, respectively.

As of the end of Q1 2026, the company’s non-money-market fund scale was 5176.34 billion yuan. Of this, the equity fund and hybrid fund scales were 842.43 billion yuan and 808.14 billion yuan, respectively, while the bond fund scale was 1469.6 billion yuan.

In terms of company performance, Hu’an Fund saw a “double decline” in operating income and net profit for two consecutive years from 2022 to 2024. In 2023, operating income was 34.39 billion yuan, down 4.56% year-on-year, and net profit was 9.35 billion yuan, down 9.32% year-on-year. In 2024, operating income was 31.1 billion yuan, down 9.56% year-on-year, and net profit was 9.1 billion yuan, down 2.66% year-on-year.

In 2025, performance rebounded. Operating income reached 34.93 billion yuan and net profit was 9.61 billion yuan.

Haifu Fund vice president Wei Jun transfers to Peng’an as general manager

Worth noting is that the other side in the recent merger—Haifu Fund—has also experienced executive changes. Vice president Wei Jun left on April 30 due to work needs. It is understood that Wei Jun’s next move will be to join Peng’an Fund, with the role of general manager being proposed.

Public information shows that Wei Jun holds a bachelor’s degree in economics. From July 1996 to August 2001, he worked at the Shenzhen branch of Bank of Communications. From August 2001 to November 2019, he held successive roles at the head office of China Merchants Bank, including Manager of the Department of Non-Banking Financial Institutions, Assistant General Manager of the Futures Settlement Department, and Assistant General Manager of the Interbank Client Department. He joined Haifu Fund in November 2019 as vice president and served for nearly 7 years.

Haifu Fund’s executive team structure consists of one president and three vice presidents. In addition to the departing Wei Jun, the vice presidents are Guangtao Hu and Xiaobo Zhou.

Xie Lebin has served as chairman of Haifu Fund since April 21, 2025. He is currently vice president of Guotai Haitong Securities. Ren Zhiqiang joined Haifu Fund earlier, in September 2017, and is currently director and general manager of Haifu Fund; his tenure has been nearly 9 years, and he has led the company to achieve steady growth in scale.

As of early 2026, Haifu Fund’s scale is about 2843 billion yuan. In 2025, its performance in non-cash fund scale rankings stood out: up 73.3% year-on-year to 2103 billion yuan.

In terms of performance, Haifu Fund’s revenue and net profit over the past five years have followed a V-shaped trend. In 2021, it recorded operating revenue of 16.38 billion yuan and net profit of 5.3 billion yuan, followed by consecutive declines, reaching a bottom in the first half of 2024. In 2025, it rebounded strongly to operating revenue of 13.33 billion yuan and net profit of 4.85 billion yuan. The performance fluctuations mainly stemmed from the contraction of equity assets, while later rebound was driven by breakthroughs in bond ETFs and pension-related business.

Haifu Fund may be smaller in scale, but it holds “trump cards.” It has three licenses: pension funds, enterprise annuities, and social security fund management, which qualifies it as a “scarce asset” under the regulatory system.

By contrast, Hu’an Fund has clear gaps in enterprise annuity and social security fund management qualifications, and its pension business qualifications are inherently insufficient. Precisely because of this, the integration with Haifu Fund can help fill Hu’an Fund’s shortcomings.

A chain reaction triggered by the parent company’s “Century Merger”

In January last year, the China Securities Regulatory Commission approved Guotai Junan’s absorption merger of Haitong Securities. The newly merged entity, Guotai Haitong Securities, was formally listed. Under the “one participation, one control” policy, the integration of Hu’an Fund and Haifu Fund is inevitable.

According to reports from multiple media outlets, the merger of the two fund companies has been determined to be led by Hu’an Fund. As early as the end of March, Guotai Haitong Vice President and Chief Risk Officer Nie Xiaogang also explicitly stated at an earnings briefing that the company is actively promoting the integration and development path of Hu’an Fund and Haifu Fund, studying various feasible plans, assessing the strengths and characteristics of both sides and their complementarity, and will continue to advance the formulation of the relevant schemes.

Judging from recent executive changes, this integration is moving along an incremental path of “Hu’an leading while Haifu is partially retained.” In the initial stage, legal entity consolidation will be achieved. Licenses such as pension funds will continue to exist independently in the form of subsidiaries or specialized departments, thereby maintaining their value.

Fang Yitian’s appointment as general manager of Hu’an Fund is precisely to put in place an experienced operator for this complex process of “merger and restructuring plus business enablement” of licenses. After all, he has experience in transforming a mid-sized public fund into an industry dark horse; in the process of digesting asset integration at a larger scale, this may prove to be more practically valuable than experience in scale alone.

If the two companies simply merged, the new entity’s total management scale across all channels would exceed one trillion yuan, and yet another giant public fund vessel would be born.

No matter what pace the merger takes, the leadership team will need to rebuild their own competitiveness on the newly formed trillion-yuan asset management platform. What the outcome will be remains to be seen.