On October 10, China Central Depository & Clearing Corporation (CCDC) and National Interbank Funding Center (NIFC) jointly launched the centralized bond lending business. On the launch day, institutions actively participated, with a total of 78 participating institutions in the first batch, comprehensively covering banks, securities firms, financial leasing companies and other institution types. Among them, 21 securities firms participated, including CITIC Securities Company Limited, Guotai Haitong Securities Co., Ltd., China International Capital Corporation, Huatai Securities, China Merchants Securities, and Shenwan Hongyuan Securities.
CCDC and NIFC stated that as an innovative product in the bond market, centralized bond lending helps prevent settlement risks and provides efficient emergency bond lending channels; helps deepen market functions and enhance market makers' position management capabilities; helps improve trading efficiency and significantly reduce negotiation costs for bond lending transactions; helps enhance market liquidity and supports investors in revitalizing existing and fragmented bonds.
Shenwan Hongyuan Securities stated that on October 10, the interbank bond market's centralized bond lending business officially launched, and the company's FICC division efficiently completed transactions with the support of the operations center, becoming a market participant that completed transaction settlement on the first day of business launch. This business implementation is an expansion of Shenwan Hongyuan Securities in the fixed income business field, and more importantly, an active participation in bond market mechanism innovation and practice to help deepen market functions.
It is reported that on the launch day, the bond lending pool scale exceeded 1.3 trillion yuan, covering treasury bonds, local government bonds, policy bank bonds, government-supported agency bonds, commercial bank bonds, non-bank financial institution bonds, corporate bonds, credit asset-backed securities and other varieties. Among them, the top ten participating institutions in the bond lending pool scale were Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, Postal Savings Bank of China, Industrial Bank, China Merchants Bank, Beijing Rural Commercial Bank, Bank of Nanjing, Zheshang Bank, and Fubon Bank (China).
The bond lending pool scale refers to the total amount of bonds that market participants can lend, and does not represent the actual volume of bond lending transactions that have occurred.
Since the People's Bank of China issued the "Administrative Measures for Bond Lending Business in the Interbank Bond Market," CCDC and NIFC have worked together to efficiently advance business preparations. Centralized bond lending is a standardized lending product provided by the central registration and custody institution, introducing convenient instruction initiation processes, scientific matching rules, refined lending rates, and automated collateral management mechanisms to achieve unified management of underlying bonds and counterparties, meeting the personalized needs of market participants.
In recent years, CCDC and NIFC have closely cooperated to continuously improve financial infrastructure services, enhancing bond trading and settlement processing efficiency through front-to-back system connectivity and maintaining stable market operations. Both parties continue to enrich bond market product offerings and improve innovative product service quality and efficiency, supporting the multi-level development of the bond lending market.
According to the introduction, centralized bond lending business is an automatic bond lending service for the interbank bond market jointly provided by CCDC and NIFC. Lenders, on a voluntary basis, complete parameter settings and set lendable bonds to form the bond lending pool. When borrowers face insufficient payable bonds on settlement day, they initiate centralized bond lending instructions through NIFC's RMB trading platform. CCDC automatically completes matching within the bond lending pool, achieves bond lending, and provides collateral management and settlement services.
Centralized bond lending business is open to all interbank bond market members, and asset management products need to be handled by their asset managers as agents.
On September 12 this year, CCDC and NIFC issued the "Notice on Conducting Centralized Bond Lending Business." To enhance market liquidity and improve settlement service efficiency, with approval from the central bank, CCDC and NIFC jointly launched the centralized bond lending business on October 10, 2025.
The centralized bond lending business sets the single lending period to a minimum of 1 day and maximum of 3 days. The lending rates for centralized bond lending business are anchored to historical transaction rates of bond lending business, calculated as weighted averages after removing extreme data. The settlement time for centralized bond lending business is 9:00-17:00 on interbank bond market settlement days.