CM BANK's "spring rush" this year signals a notable shift in strategy. Whereas banks previously competed on total loan volume in the first quarter, the focus of CM BANK's corporate business is now pivoting from "how much to invest" to "who receives the investment" and "how it is deployed." Its credit resources are being reconfigured with unprecedented precision, withdrawing from traditional sectors and realigning along the chains of national strategy and industrial upgrading. This is not merely a simple sector rotation but represents a profound transformation from being a "capital intermediary" to a "value discoverer." The core challenge lies in whether the bank can establish industrial insight and risk-pricing capabilities fundamentally different from the traditional model. This shift is clearly visible in recent industry dynamics. When bank relationship managers visit technology-oriented SMEs, the discussion focus has shifted away from traditional property collateral to technical details, patent value, and downstream orders. This reflects a fundamental change in credit logic: from relying on historical assets to assessing future cash flows and a company's position within the industrial chain. Policy direction has reinforced this transformation trend. The People's Bank of China, in its "Monetary Policy Execution Report for the Fourth Quarter of 2025" released in January 2026, explicitly required commercial banks to "optimize credit structure and channel more financial resources towards promoting technological innovation, advanced manufacturing, green development, and small and micro enterprises." This provides clear top-level guidance for banks' credit allocation. Industry operational pressures serve as the internal driver for this transformation. According to regulatory data released by the National Financial Regulatory Administration in January 2026, the net interest margin of commercial banks remains persistently at historically low levels. This implies that the extensive model of relying on scale expansion for interest income is no longer sustainable, making refined, structured credit allocation an inevitable choice for survival and development.
The traditional approach to the "spring rush" for banks centered on sprinting for loan scale. Under this guidance, credit resources naturally flowed to sectors capable of rapidly boosting volume. A seasoned banking insider admitted that previously, a single large infrastructure or real estate project could often support a business unit's performance targets for half a year. However, CM BANK's strategy in 2026 shows a fundamental difference. In its annual business deployment, the head office for the first time prioritized "structural optimization" above "volume growth." This seemingly subtle adjustment in sequence actually marks a complete reversal of operational logic: from chasing short-term statement profits to planning for long-term asset quality and core client relationships. The logic chain is clear and pragmatic. During a period of deep economic structural transformation, expanding into low-quality, high-risk areas not only fails to generate sustainable profits but also accumulates significant potential asset risks. Proactively optimizing the credit structure is essentially a forward-looking defense and strategic positioning of the bank's own balance sheet. Market observations indicate that a new performance evaluation "baton" has been set. When reporting performance, branch offices must now submit structural quality metrics such as the "proportion of loans to strategic emerging industries" and the "number of first-time loan clients among tech enterprises," alongside traditional loan increment figures. Operations on the front lines are changing accordingly. The focus of relationship managers is shifting from revolving around government platforms and large property developers to delving into high-tech parks and innovation incubators. Credit business is no longer viewed as a standardized funding product but as a key tool for selecting, nurturing, and growing alongside future core enterprises. Of course, this shift comes with practical challenges. The bank must withstand short-term performance pains resulting from the change in client mix and needs to continuously invest resources into building a completely new system of industrial knowledge and risk assessment.
Under this clear strategic direction, credit resources are undergoing large-scale reallocation. CM BANK's credit deployment map shows a distinct pattern of "advancing and retreating." This is not a simple abandonment of traditional industries but an active choice made after meticulous weighing of risks and returns. On the "advancing" front, the primary targets are hard-tech companies possessing critical core technologies. Since the start of the year, CM BANK has significantly intensified services for "specialized, refined, distinctive, and innovative" SMEs, concentrating credit resources on core links of industrial chains highlighted by national strategy, such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, biopharmaceuticals, and high-end equipment manufacturing. The commercial logic is that by deeply serving these high-growth, high-value-added sectors, the bank can obtain risk premiums through deeper industrial understanding, thereby countering profit pressures from overall market interest margin compression and building long-term, stable client barriers in the process. This logic is being implemented through innovative products. For instance, targeting industries like chip design and biopharma, characterized by long R&D cycles and light assets, CM BANK has launched specialized loans centered on "future intellectual property pledges" and "order financing." The key assessment shifts from evaluating existing fixed assets to analyzing the patent barriers of the technology, market prospects of the product, and the depth of binding with downstream leading clients. Secondly, the scope of "green finance" is being substantially broadened and deepened. Previously, banks' green credit was primarily directed towards large-scale infrastructure projects like photovoltaic power stations and wind farms. Currently, CM BANK's green financial services are penetrating deeper down industrial chains, focusing on supporting physical enterprises' technological upgrades for energy saving and carbon reduction. Its "Green Supply Chain Financing Solution" aims to provide specialized funds for SMEs in industries like automotive, electronics, and building materials to purchase energy-saving equipment and build waste recycling production lines. This change signifies green finance's evolution from supporting large "emission reduction projects" to activating microscopic "manufacturing cells," integrating financial services more closely with the daily productive emission reduction activities of实体 enterprises. On the "retreating" side, this is reflected in the continued, proactive contraction of exposure to certain high-risk areas. Although banks typically do not publicly disclose specific industry reduction data, the market clearly sensed in Q1 2026 that banks' approval attitudes towards new financing for certain highly leveraged industries and traditional overcapacity sectors became more cautious, with thresholds significantly raised. Analyses from multiple market institutions indicate this reflects a consensus strategy within the banking sector during economic restructuring: proactively managing risk exposure during the risk clearance process in specific industries, and concentrating scarce capital more heavily into areas aligned with long-term economic transformation directions and with more controllable asset quality. This strategic "exit" requires firm resolve, as it often means sacrificing some immediate, certain interest income and directly pressuring the short-term performance assessments of related business lines.
After selecting the right sectors, the more formidable challenge becomes how to safely and efficiently allocate funds to these clients, who often have light asset structures and novel risk profiles, and ensure the capital is truly used to enhance their competitiveness. CM BANK's response strategy centers on pushing credit services to "penetrate" the industrial chain, embedding the logic of risk management deeply into the actual operational and transactional scenarios of enterprises. The key innovation lies in attempting to use "transaction data credit" and "credit of the industrial chain's core enterprise" to partially replace or even surpass the traditional "fixed asset collateral credit." Traditional corporate credit models primarily scrutinize the borrower's comprehensive credit and collateral. The model CM BANK is currently striving to build emphasizes "credit based on real transactions." As long as a company is embedded in a stable, healthy industrial chain ecosystem with continuous, verifiable orders and cash flows, it can enter the bank's financial service purview, even if its tangible assets on the balance sheet are limited. This essentially involves using financial instruments flexibly to transform the credit and commercial reputation of core enterprises within the industrial chain into transferable, traceable financial credit, which is then "drip-irrigated" to upstream and downstream SMEs. Supply chain finance is the core tool for practicing this concept. In early 2026, CM BANK iterated and upgraded its online supply chain finance platform, with a key focus on increasing the decision-making weight of "multi-dimensional industrial data" in client profiling, quota determination, and post-loan warning. Specifically, an SME component supplier with a long-term supply relationship to a renowned OEM, which previously faced financing bottlenecks due to lack of sufficient collateral, can now receive financing from CM BANK for upstream raw material procurement. This is based on confirmation of the core manufacturer's accounts payable and the historical record of long-term, high-frequency transactions between them. Funds form a closed loop between the bank, supplier, and upstream, with clear and controllable usage. This model precisely addresses SME financing difficulties while also "anchoring" the bank's services more deeply to key nodes of the industrial chain. Another key strategy involves联动 with equity investment institutions. For fast-growing tech innovation companies, CM BANK promotes comprehensive "investment-loan linkage" services. The model is that after a company receives equity financing from a reputable venture capital firm, CM BANK can provide a certain proportion of debt financing based on its recognition of the investor's professional capability and its analysis of the investment agreement terms (e.g., valuation, fund usage, governance structure). The drawdown节奏 of such loans is often meticulously matched to the company's key product development milestones, capacity expansion, or market promotion plans. A professional engaged in tech financial services noted that this model "constructs a new type of bank-enterprise relationship characterized by 'risk sharing and growth sharing,' where the bank transforms from a capital provider into a strategic growth partner." The sustainability of this collaborative model highly depends on whether long-term, stable mutual trust mechanisms and clear, reasonable risk-reward sharing frameworks can be established between the bank and investment institutions.
An aggressive shift in credit allocation inevitably poses disruptive challenges to traditional risk management systems. When traditional collateral becomes nearly ineffective and static financial statements cannot fully reflect a company's future value, the risk control models that have operated for years face "failure" in many new areas. CM BANK's systematic response is to drive a genetic-level evolution in the bank-wide risk control logic: shifting from primarily relying on "retrospective verification" of historical information to strengthening "forward-looking judgment" of industry trends and corporate prospects; from emphasizing whether formal担保 coverage is sufficient to probing the enterprise's substantive resilience and sustainable growth capability. This is undoubtedly the most complex and arduous core engineering project within the entire transformation. At the implementation level, CM BANK has further strengthened specialized industry research capabilities within its organizational structure. The head office and key branches have formed cross-departmental industry research teams to continuously track key sectors like semiconductors, new energy, and the digital economy. The research output is no longer generic reports but must form quantifiable, applicable "industry risk assessment coordinates" and "client准入 negative lists" directly embedded into the credit approval process. For example, when reviewing a loan application from a new materials company, the credit approval officer must simultaneously consider the company's financial data, the "technology roadmap substitution risk analysis" provided by the industry team, and the certification level and procurement share stability of the company's products within the supply chain of downstream leading clients. The basis for risk decisions expands from a single financial module to a multi-dimensional matrix of "finance + technology + market." In post-loan management, monitoring indicators have become more dynamic and forward-looking. For tech companies, monitoring focus extends to R&D investment intensity, turnover rate of core technical personnel, status of key patent applications and maintenance, and the iteration speed of main products. For supply chain finance assets, the system monitors the transaction stability and settlement cycle changes between the core enterprise and its上下游 in real-time to warn of potential systemic risks across the entire chain. "The转变 in our risk control philosophy is paying more attention to the borrower's 'evolutionary capability' in a dynamic market, rather than just its 'asset thickness' at a single point in time," summarized a head of a bank's risk management department. The full lifecycle management of a corporate loan is increasingly resembling a continuously updated fundamental investment跟踪 report on the enterprise. This highly specialized risk control system ultimately places extreme demands on "people." To address this, CM BANK initiated a large-scale "Business Personnel Industry Empowerment" plan at the start of the year. Relationship managers and product managers undergo series of trainings covering hardcore content like basic industry knowledge, technical principle diagrams, and carbon emission accounting methods. The goal is direct: to propel frontline staff from being "promoters of financial products" to becoming "industry advisors who understand the client's business and can provide comprehensive solutions." The cost of this large-scale human capital reshaping and its conversion efficiency will ultimately determine the depth and boundaries of this strategic transformation.
The strategic reallocation of credit resources demonstrated by CM BANK in this "spring rush" is far more than a periodic business adjustment. It is a deep, systematic strategic calibration, signaling that China's most market-sensitive commercial bank is attempting to carve out a differentiated path in the competitive red ocean of corporate banking. This path is driven by "deep industrial insight" leading to "precise risk pricing," and ultimately achieving "efficient capital allocation." When an industry标杆率先 switches its credit model from extensive "scale expansion" to precise "value挖掘," a deeper, industry-wide question emerges: Will this highly specialized, necessarily selective "lean credit" model, while enhancing the asset quality and efficiency of individual institutions, exacerbate "structural preferences" in resource allocation across the entire financial system? Will traditional industries vital to the national economy but burdened by heavy转型步伐 face a more pronounced "crowding-out effect" of credit resources? For the vast majority of small and medium-sized banks, which lack the vast retail business profits for cross-subsidization and cannot afford massive investments in technology and talent, is the path explored by CM BANK an unattainable "premier示范," or does it预示 the future "entry threshold" for survival and competition in corporate banking over the next decade?