Serving a cumulative total of 667,100 business entities, ranking first in China's government-backed financing guarantee system; adding 72.631 billion yuan in new re-guarantee business scale, ranking 5th nationally; maintaining an outstanding guarantee balance of 136.685 billion yuan, ranking 3rd nationwide; achieving a cumulative guarantee scale exceeding 456.9 billion yuan... From January to August this year, Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group led the provincial system members to deliver outstanding performance results.

Among these figures, serving 667,100 business entities deserves particular attention. This not only represents leadership in service scale but also reflects the extensive coverage and deep penetration of Shandong's government-backed guarantee network.

These achievements are no coincidence. Over the past five years, Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group has consistently focused on its primary responsibility of supporting small enterprises and agriculture, actively leveraging the "small input, big impact" function of fiscal funds. The group has successfully transformed the national top-level design of "establishing a modern financial system with high adaptability, competitiveness, and inclusiveness" into a practical model for Shandong's government-backed financing guarantee system, pioneering a new path where "finance for the people" and "fiscal-financial coordination" mutually reinforce each other.

**Credit "Value Addition" Breaks Financing Ice**

Limited collateral from enterprises makes banks reluctant to lend - this is where financing difficulties lie. Shandong Hongrui Pharmaceutical Technology Co., Ltd., located in Bincheng District of Binzhou City, is a national high-tech enterprise specializing in pharmaceutical intermediate R&D, production, and sales. Despite its strong technical capabilities, the company faced similar challenges in obtaining unsecured credit loans two years ago.

"It was extremely difficult for our company to obtain unsecured credit loans from banks at that time," recalled Jiang Lijun, the company's financial manager. "We urgently needed financial support but lacked sufficient collateral, causing financing bottlenecks."

At the critical moment, Binzhou Financing Guarantee Group extended a helping hand. Through government-backed guarantee credit enhancement, Hongrui Pharmaceutical successively obtained three unsecured credit loans totaling 15 million yuan from banks, successfully overcoming the crisis. Jiang Lijun reflected: "The intervention of government-backed guarantees truly demonstrated the leveraging effect of 'small input, big impact.'"

Today, the company has not only established diversified financing channels through asset mortgages and intellectual property pledges but also looks forward to future cooperation with Binzhou Financing Guarantee Group. As the company plans to enter the biological fermentation sector, Jiang Lijun hopes both parties can engage in deeper cooperation across multiple areas including industrial resource matching and investment-loan linkage, achieving win-win development.

This represents not only "timely assistance" to enterprises but also Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group's construction of a government-backed credit enhancement system, helping enterprises break free from "collateral dependency" through fundamental transformation.

During the "14th Five-Year Plan" period, the group leveraged policy-oriented guarantees and utilized risk-sharing mechanisms to "embolden" banks and "enhance credit" for enterprises, making credit a "realizable asset."

In August 2024, on the launch day of the National Science and Technology Innovation Guarantee Program, Shandong was the first to implement the initial batch of 18 businesses nationwide. Behind this was the group's efficient coordination with the Provincial Science and Technology Department and Industry and Information Technology Department, pre-sorting over 80,000 sci-tech enterprises across the province and embedding them into digital platforms, enabling guarantee institutions to "check with one click" and banks to "see at a glance."

Targeting the characteristics of sci-tech enterprises being "asset-light, high-growth, and collateral-scarce," Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group innovatively launched "Ludan Technology Loan," providing exclusive financing solutions for technology enterprises.

Over five years, the "credit enhancement" from government-backed financing guarantees has not only cleared financing bottlenecks but also activated positive cycles in industrial chains. This innovative practice has yielded results - cumulatively supporting 15,800 specialized, refined, innovative, and high-tech business entities with 70.004 billion yuan in funding.

From "afraid to lend" to "confident lending," from "scarce collateral" to "credit as asset," Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group combines policy intentions with market wisdom, directing financial resources precisely where the real economy needs them most.

**Financing Costs "Down," Small Business Vitality "Up"**

Small enterprise scale leads to high "risk premiums" - this is where expensive financing originates.

"For small enterprises like ours, every penny must be used wisely. With reduced financing costs, our development confidence has strengthened!" The CFO of Shandong Yuzhong Automotive Technology Co., Ltd. told reporters that through Jinan Guarantee Group's "Jidan-Entrepreneurship Loan," they obtained a 2 million yuan loan with comprehensive financing costs of only 1.75%, saving considerable expenses annually compared to traditional loans.

This "saved" cost directly translates into enterprise development confidence, driving employment for over 100 people, with company sales exceeding 20 million yuan in the first half of 2025.

Zhang Shisen, head of Qianyu Electronic Technology Company, similarly experienced the benefits of reduced financing costs. "Through the 'Vitality Loan' product, we obtained a 500,000 yuan loan with annual interest of only 17,000 yuan, plus government subsidies of 5,000 yuan, making the actual financing cost significantly lower than ordinary loans!" Zhang told reporters that low-cost funding helped the company seize order opportunities.

For small and micro enterprises with already thin profit margins, subtle differences in financing costs often determine whether they can establish themselves in market competition or be overwhelmed by heavy financial burdens.

The genuine feelings of business leaders reveal the core essence of government-backed financing guarantee work - cost reduction is not a numbers game but practical relief and assistance, "adding fuel to the fire" for small and micro enterprises and "fertilizing and watering" for agricultural entities.

For these economic "capillaries," financing cost levels directly relate to survival and development. As a non-profit, quasi-public welfare provincial financial enterprise, Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group fully leverages counter-cyclical adjustment functions, implementing preferential guarantee rates in key regions and sectors while strictly constraining partner banks from indirectly increasing customer costs through deposit-loan linkage or fee-based lending.

The effectiveness is directly reflected in the data: as of August this year, the provincial system's cooperative business average guarantee rate is only 0.62%. On the lending side, banks are guided to implement preferential interest rates, with new business average loan rates at 4.47%, declining another 15 basis points from year-end, demonstrating significant effects of government-backed financing guarantees in benefiting enterprises and agriculture.

**"Cloud-based" Living Water, "Digital Intelligence" Nourishing Small and Micro Enterprises**

How long does it take for a 10 million yuan supply chain note to go from issuance to loan disbursement? Qiaochang Modern Agriculture Co., Ltd.'s experience provides the answer: fully online operations with same-day bank disbursement.

"Suppliers initiate discount applications to banks, and after successful bank acceptance, funds are disbursed the same day - faster than our normal payment process," said Wang Yejian, Financial Department Director of Qiaochang Modern Agriculture.

Behind this efficiency is the digital ecosystem constructed by Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group through the "Ludan Huiqi Tong" platform. This system not only breaks the traditional bank-guarantee business pattern of repetitive document transfers and lengthy, congested processes but also uses dual credit enhancement mechanisms to precisely "drip-irrigate" core enterprise credit to small and micro enterprises at the end of industrial chains, improving accounts payable turnover frequency, reducing financing costs across the entire supply chain, and injecting development vitality into upstream and downstream enterprises.

This is not an isolated case but a microcosm of Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group's digital transformation to reshape government-backed financing guarantee services.

Since the "14th Five-Year Plan," Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group has independently built a unified bank-guarantee interface platform, driving business transformation from "people running errands" to "data running roads." The platform not only directly connects to the National Financing Guarantee Fund's direct guarantee SaaS system, achieving one-stop handling of business acceptance, approval, and registration, but also interfaces with 117 banking institutions including Shandong Provincial Rural Credit Union, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Shandong Branch, Agricultural Bank of China Shandong Branch, and Qilu Bank, clearing the "last mile" of bank-guarantee data sharing.

As of August 2025, purely online national guarantee "general-to-general" batch bank-guarantee cooperation products have cumulatively landed 57.906 billion yuan, serving 18,000 small, micro, and agricultural business entities province-wide, with business scale ranking second nationally.

Digitalization is not only "fast" but also "accurate" and "stable." Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group has built a solid digital foundation with "one cloud" and "one center," establishing the province's government-backed guarantee private cloud. Since 2023, it has passed national security level protection Level 3 certification for two consecutive years, becoming the only remote data backup center for the National Guarantee Fund's national government-backed financing guarantee digital platform. The group has constructed a big data center, aggregating government affairs, market, guarantee, and credit data to form a multi-dimensional, penetrable dynamic monitoring system.

In risk control, intelligent models are embedded in business processes, achieving full-cycle management of customer access pre-review, risk signal early warning, and intelligent post-guarantee reminders, with compensation rates far below the national average.

From "offline transfers" to "online instant access," from "single-point attempts" to "ecosystem reconstruction," Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group's digital transformation has not only improved efficiency and controlled risks but also reshaped the paradigm of government-backed guarantee services. This path represents deep practice of technology-enabled inclusive finance and the high-quality development foundation that Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group has painted for small, micro, and agricultural enterprises during the "14th Five-Year Plan" period through reform and innovation.

**Weaving a Comprehensive Guarantee "Network," Activating Real Economy "Microcirculation"**

Previously, municipal and county-level financing guarantee institutions generally exhibited characteristics of being small, scattered, and weak, with high access thresholds for guarantee institutions participating in bank-guarantee cooperation, often resulting in compressed guarantee multipliers. How to clear these bottlenecks and enhance banks' confidence and willingness to lend became a key issue that Shandong had to address in constructing a modern government-backed financing guarantee system.

Since the "14th Five-Year Plan," Shandong Investment and Financing Guarantee Group has addressed this through systematic construction, establishing a three-tier coordinated framework of "National Financing Guarantee Fund - Provincial Guarantee Group - Municipal and County Guarantee Institutions," building a government-backed financing guarantee network covering all 16 cities in the province with 60 member units.

This system effectively integrates previously scattered guarantee resources, significantly improving service efficiency and capital operation efficiency through strengthened top-level design, unified management standards, and optimized risk sharing.

Within this systematic framework, Binzhou City's practice has become a vivid example of deep advancement. Recently, Binzhou Financing Guarantee Group and Zouping Municipal People's Government held a strategic cooperation signing ceremony and Zouping Guarantee Company equity transfer ceremony, marking the official establishment of Binzhou Financing Guarantee Group's Zouping subsidiary.

This cooperation not only increased Binzhou Financing Guarantee Group's registered capital from 700 million yuan to 942 million yuan but also further promoted integration and coordination of citywide guarantee resources, injecting new momentum for high-quality county economy services.

Today, under provincial system leadership, municipal guarantee institutions are taking initiative and working collaboratively, gradually forming internal momentum for coordinated support of small enterprises and agriculture. Weifang's outstanding business scale exceeded 36 billion yuan, Jinan reached 24 billion yuan, and both Jining and Yantai exceeded 10 billion yuan. Among these, Weifang and Jinan's scales, if calculated separately, could enter the top 20 national provincial institutions, significantly enhancing regional service capabilities.

From single-point attempts to comprehensive networking, from loose cooperation to systematic operations, Shandong is continuously driving financial resource aggregation toward the real economy through a comprehensive, efficient government-backed financing guarantee network covering the entire province.