China’s banking sector is rapidly embracing artificial intelligence (AI), embedding the technology across operations, risk management, customer engagement, and lending, in a bid to build smarter, more responsive financial services.
The push is being supported at the policy level, with China’s central bank advocating for secure and orderly AI deployment, ensuring that innovation is balanced with risk control and regulatory compliance.
AI Applications Driving Operational Efficiency
At Jiangsu Su Merchants Bank, over 90 AI applications, powered by both self-developed and external large models, are already deployed across multiple business scenarios. Key outcomes include:
- Smart lending: multimodal large models achieve 97% accuracy in identifying nonstandard credit documents, while approval efficiency improves by 20%
- Risk management: AI-driven decision systems deliver millisecond-level responses across the full loan lifecycle, improving fraud risk labeling by 35%
- Integration into 60+ business scenarios, serving 4,000+ tech enterprises and 17 million retail customers
MYbank, in collaboration with Zhejiang University, has developed a laboratory focused on intelligent micro and small business finance, using generative and discriminative models to optimize credit risk assessment for small and micro enterprises.
“The consistency rate between AI-driven credit decisions and human judgment has jumped from 39% to 90%, significantly enhancing efficiency while freeing up human resources,” said the bank’s team.
Full-Chain AI Platforms
The Bank of Beijing has launched an intelligent computing platform in partnership with the Mentougou district government. The platform embeds AI capabilities across:
- Marketing
- Risk control
- Operations
- Lending
It allows unified management of enterprise AI computing resources, improving efficiency and reducing hardware costs, while maintaining careful oversight to prevent AI errors, data security issues, and other risks.
Strategic and Market Impact
A recent PwC report shows that financial institutions view AI as a strategic engine, not just a tool for efficiency. Early AI investments have yielded 10–15% returns, while banks increasingly focus on long-term value: enhancing market positioning, exploring new growth avenues, and strengthening strategic development.
Xiao Yuanqi, vice-minister of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, emphasized that AI applications in finance are primarily supportive, spanning:
- Mid- and back-office intelligentization
- Customer engagement
- Financial product delivery
AI provides dual benefits — reducing costs and increasing efficiency, while enabling more customized and targeted financial services.