Retail Inflection Point Emerging, Ping An Bank Sets Course for Growth Return This Year

(Source: Beijing Business Daily)

“2025 will be a challenging year, but also a year to lay a more solid foundation for future development.” On March 23, Ping An Bank’s 2025 annual performance conference was held as scheduled. President Ji Guangheng and the management team attended, directly addressing market concerns, providing a comprehensive review of the bank’s operations in 2025, and announcing the core goal for 2026: “Strive to return to growth.” At the conference, “retail turning point,” “strengthening corporate business,” and “technology-driven” also became frequently mentioned keywords.

Initial Signs of a Retail Turning Point

Two years ago, Ping An Bank launched a comprehensive strategic reform, focusing on clearing high-risk existing assets, optimizing business structure, and upgrading refined management. 2025 is a critical year for the reform to take effect and the toughest year under transformation.

On March 20, Ping An Bank released its 2025 “report card.” From an operational perspective, the pressure remains significant. In 2025, the bank achieved operating income of 131.442 billion yuan, down 10.4% year-on-year; net profit was 42.633 billion yuan, down 4.2% year-on-year.

As early as the mid-year performance release in August 2025, Ji Guangheng stated, “2025 will be our most difficult year.” When discussing the full-year operational performance this time, he again described it as “very difficult.”

He said, “2025 is a very difficult year for Ping An Bank, but it is also a year to lay a more solid foundation for future development. Due to low market interest rates, continued benefits to the real economy, and proactive adjustments to the business structure, the bank’s revenue and profits declined year-on-year. However, with the ongoing deepening of strategic reforms, some operational indicators are showing positive trends.”

One of the most direct positive changes is the stabilization of retail profits. The annual report shows that in 2025, Ping An Bank’s retail financial business revenue was 61.626 billion yuan, down 13.51% year-on-year; retail financial net profit reached 2.683 billion yuan, an increase of 828.37% from 2024’s 289 million yuan. Income from wealth management in retail business also showed growth, with fee income of 5.061 billion yuan, up 15.8%. Among these, income from agency personal insurance was 1.292 billion yuan, up 53.3%; agency personal wealth management income was 1.287 billion yuan, up 8.8%; and agency personal fund income was 2.29 billion yuan, up 8.9%.

“Although 2025 was a very difficult year for Ping An Bank, retail credit scale stopped declining since the second half of last year, credit card business stabilized locally, and mortgage and auto financing balances achieved positive growth compared to the end of the previous year. Meanwhile, retail asset quality significantly improved, and wealth management income, represented by bancassurance, continued to contribute,” Ji Guangheng said.

Ping An Bank’s Assistant President Wang Jun further added, “Over the past two years, Ping An Bank has actively adjusted its retail business structure, optimized risk policies, and reshaped growth momentum. After this phase of effective adjustment, the most difficult period for retail business has passed, with many core indicators improving. The retail business turning point has gradually appeared. It is preliminarily expected that retail revenue and profits will further increase and improve. While achieving benefits growth, Ping An Bank will also further strengthen customer management and structural optimization.”

Full Effort to Return to Growth

In 2025, Ping An Bank advanced through the pains of transformation, completing the clearance of high-risk assets and optimization of business structure. Facing 2026, the first year of the “14th Five-Year Plan,” Ji Guangheng repeatedly reaffirmed the goal of “full effort to return to growth.”

At the strategic level, Ping An Bank remains committed to the strategy of “strengthening retail, refining corporate banking, and specializing in peer institutions.” On the retail front, the bank promotes the development of mid-yield credit banking, strong bancassurance, wealth banking, and low-cost digital banking; optimizes product systems on the asset side; and pushes for increased volume of mid-yield products. On the liability side, the focus is on enriching high-quality product offerings, reducing interest costs, and paying attention to consumption expansion potential and wealth allocation needs.

During this critical period of transformation, Ping An Bank has clearly chosen corporate business as a breakthrough point to create space for retail recovery, with phased results supporting the goal of “return to growth.” By the end of 2025, the bank’s corporate deposits reached 2.295255 trillion yuan, a 2.2% increase from the previous year; corporate loans totaled 1.663546 trillion yuan, up 3.5%. Ji Guangheng emphasized that the bank will withstand the pains of transformation, maintain steady growth in retail, and actively expand and stabilize corporate business.

However, the management also recognizes the weaknesses in corporate business. “Overall, Ping An Bank’s corporate clients are still relatively weak,” said Vice President Fang Wehao. He noted that while the bank is growing rapidly, it must remain cautious, learning from advanced peers, and accelerating progress through “refining corporate banking” and “customer segmentation and management.”

Technology-driven development is also a key tool for Ping An Bank to achieve the goal of “return to growth.” Ji Guangheng stressed that the bank will seize opportunities brought by the new wave of technological revolution, upgrade its technological capabilities, strengthen AI applications, and increase resource investment; focus on digital employees, precise marketing, and risk control to empower operations, reduce costs, and increase revenue; enhance data infrastructure, deepen master data management, and expand external data applications, evolving from human-machine collaboration to intelligent decision-making and automated execution.

Despite signs of a retail turning point and steady progress in corporate business, Ping An Bank still faces multiple challenges to fully realize its “return to growth” goal. Renowned economist Pan Helin pointed out that the bank faces multiple pressures: first, the dual decline in revenue and profits, with increasing difficulty in boosting these metrics; second, the pain period in business structure, with retail income decreasing and the need for new business to fill the gap; third, environmental pressures such as interest rate liberalization, diversified financing channels for users, and intensified peer competition.

“Ping An Bank needs to focus on its strengths to achieve differentiated development,” Pan Helin further advised. He emphasized the importance of digital and intelligent transformation, leveraging online tools to optimize customer acquisition, and improving the professionalism and precision of corporate banking products tailored to different clients.

Beijing Business Daily Reporter Song Yitong