With the release of the China Banking Wealth Management Market Annual Report (2025), the performance of the wealth management market over the past year has come to light: the outstanding scale has surpassed 33.29 trillion yuan, with a cumulative issuance of 33,400 new wealth management products and total fundraising of 76.33 trillion yuan throughout the year.
The most closely watched aspect of this report for ordinary investors remains the performance of wealth management yields. Against a backdrop of generally declining market-wide interest rates, the average yield of wealth management products in 2025 unusually fell below 2%, dropping to 1.98%. However, the number of investors holding wealth management products in 2025 increased by approximately 18 million compared to the end of the previous year, reaching 143 million by year-end.
From the perspective of asset allocation structure, wealth management products significantly increased their allocation to public funds in 2025, reduced the proportion of direct allocations to equity assets and bonds, and also notably raised the allocation ratio to cash and bank deposits.
The outstanding scale exceeded 33 trillion yuan, with an increase of another 3 trillion yuan this year? The report shows that as of the end of 2025, a total of 159 banking institutions and 32 wealth management companies had outstanding wealth management products, with a total of 46,300 products outstanding, an increase of 14.89% from the beginning of the year; the outstanding scale was 33.29 trillion yuan, an increase of 3.34 trillion yuan from 29.95 trillion yuan at the end of 2024, representing a growth of approximately 11.15%.
This scale marks the highest annual increase in wealth management scale since 2021 and represents the second consecutive year of growth exceeding 3 trillion yuan. Looking at the figures quarter by quarter, the outstanding scale of wealth management products in the entire market was 29.14 trillion yuan, 30.67 trillion yuan, and 32.13 trillion yuan at the end of the first, second, and third quarters of 2025, respectively. Based on this calculation, apart from a scale decrease in the first quarter, the single-quarter scale of wealth management grew by over one trillion yuan from the second to the fourth quarter of last year.
The dominant position of wealth management companies in the entire market continued to intensify. By the end of 2025, wealth management companies had 33,700 products outstanding, with an outstanding scale of 30.71 trillion yuan, an increase of 16.72% from the beginning of the year, accounting for 92.25% of the entire market, a further rise from 87.85% at the end of the previous year.
From the perspective of product structure, extended durations and an increased share of hybrid and closed-end products were notable characteristics of the 2025 wealth management market. As of the end of 2025, the outstanding scale of closed-end products with terms exceeding one year accounted for 70.87% of all closed-end products, an increase of 3.72 percentage points from the beginning of the year.
Fixed-income products remain the mainstream in the wealth management market, but both the scale and proportion of hybrid products are growing. By the end of 2025, the outstanding scale of fixed-income products was 32.32 trillion yuan, accounting for 97.09% of the total outstanding scale of all wealth management products, a decrease of 0.24 percentage points from the beginning of the year; the outstanding scale of hybrid products was 0.87 trillion yuan, accounting for 2.61%, an increase of 0.17 percentage points from the beginning of the year; the outstanding scales of equity products and commodity & financial derivatives products were relatively small, at 80 billion yuan and 20 billion yuan, respectively.
Looking ahead to 2026, considering both resident asset allocation demand and the market environment, many institutions are optimistic about the growth expectations for wealth management scale within the year. "Due to bond yields being at historical lows, it is expected that the outstanding scale of hybrid products will continue to recover this year," judged Liao Zhiming, a fixed income and banking analyst at Huayuan Securities, who also estimates that the wealth management scale in 2026 is still expected to grow by over 3 trillion yuan.
Wang Yifeng, a banking analyst at Everbright Securities, also stated that the comparison effect between deposits and asset management products like wealth management may intensify deposit "disintermediation," but constrained by factors such as increased yield volatility due to "true net value" operation and pressure from the scale retraction of "ranking-chasing" products, the growth pace of wealth management scale might be bumpy. "The wealth management scale in 2026 is still expected to grow by over 3 trillion yuan," he predicted in his latest report.
Average yield breaks below 2%, another 18 million investors enter the market. In the era of low interest rates, alongside the narrative of "deposit migration," wealth management yields are also receiving significant attention.
The report shows that in 2025, wealth management products cumulatively generated returns of 730.3 billion yuan for investors, an increase of 2.87% over the previous year; the average yield of wealth management products for the full year was 1.98% (the arithmetic average of monthly yields within the statistical period), a decrease of 0.67 percentage points from 2.65% in 2024.
This also marks a rare instance where the annual average yield of wealth management products has fallen below 2%. Looking back, the average yields of wealth management products in 2023 and 2024 were 2.94% and 2.65% respectively, and this yield level dropped to 2.12% in the first half of 2025.
Extending the timeline, although statistical calibers have differed with the advancement of wealth management's net-value transformation, the trend of declining wealth management product yields following the downward trend of market interest rates is clear. Previous annual reports show that in 2019, the weighted average annualized return paid to clients for closed-end wealth management products was 4.44%; in 2020, the weighted yield of newly issued wealth management products was 3.93%; across the months of 2021, the weighted average annualized yield of wealth management products reached a high of 3.97% and a low of 2.29%.
"In recent years, the weighted yield of wealth management products has basically moved in sync with the 10-year government bond yield," the 2020 wealth management market annual report indicated, noting that the weighted yield of newly issued wealth management products that year was 100 basis points higher than the 10-year government bond yield. In December 2021, the weighted average annualized yield of wealth management products was 3.55%, 72 basis points higher than the 10-year government bond yield.
At the end of 2025, the 10-year government bond yield fluctuated around 1.85%, recently falling to near 1.83%. Based on this calculation, the current average wealth management yield is only about 15 basis points higher than the 10-year government bond yield.
"In December 2025, the average upper performance benchmark for newly issued RMB fixed-income wealth management products from wealth management companies was 2.75%, and the average lower performance benchmark was 2.25%. It is expected that the average lower performance benchmark may trend towards 2.0%," judged Liao Zhiming.
However, under the comparison effect, the declining yields have not deterred investors from entering the market. By the end of 2025, the number of investors holding wealth management products reached 143 million, among which, the number of individual investors increased by 17.69 million from the beginning of the year, and the number of institutional investors increased by 310,000 from the beginning of the year.
The risk preferences of individual wealth management investors also showed interesting changes, with the proportion of investors with high-risk preferences rising for several consecutive quarters. As of the end of 2025, among the 141 million individual investors, the largest group was still those with a risk preference of Level 2 (prudent), accounting for 33.54%. The proportions of individual investors with risk preferences of Level 1 (conservative) and Level 5 (aggressive) increased by 0.48 percentage points and 1.30 percentage points, respectively, from the beginning of the year.
Significantly increased allocation to public funds, reduced allocation to stocks and bonds. In a low-interest-rate environment, ordinary investors need to consider choices for placing their wealth, while wealth management institutions face pressure in allocating assets.
Currently, medium- and low-risk products still dominate the wealth management market. As of the end of 2025, the outstanding scale of wealth management products with a risk rating of Level 2 (medium-low) and below was 31.87 trillion yuan, accounting for 95.73% of the total outstanding scale of all wealth management products; the outstanding scale of products with a risk rating of Level 4 (medium-high) and above was 0.08 trillion yuan, accounting for only 0.24% of the total outstanding scale.
Correspondingly, the asset allocation of wealth management products is still primarily focused on fixed-income assets. As of the end of 2025, the total assets invested by wealth management products amounted to 35.66 trillion yuan, with balances allocated to bond classes (including bonds and interbank certificates of deposit), non-standardized debt assets, and equity assets being 18.52 trillion yuan, 1.82 trillion yuan, and 0.66 trillion yuan, respectively, accounting for 51.93%, 5.10%, and 1.85% of the total investment assets.
Looking specifically at the breakdown by asset type, the trend of wealth management increasing allocations to public funds in 2025 was evident. The proportion invested in public funds at year-end was 5.1%, an increase of 2.2 percentage points from 2.9% at the beginning of the year, and a rise of 1.2 percentage points from 3.9% at the end of the third quarter of 2025; the allocation ratio for cash and bank deposits also increased significantly, rising from 23.9% to 28.2%, an increase of over 4 percentage points.
Concurrently, the allocation ratio of wealth management to bonds decreased from 43.5% at the end of 2024 to 39.7%; the allocation to equity assets dropped from 2.6% to 1.9%. Over the same period, the allocation ratio for interbank certificates of deposit also decreased by 2.2 percentage points to 12.2%.
This trend was even more pronounced in the fourth quarter of last year. A Huayuan Securities report indicated that in the fourth quarter of 2025, wealth management significantly increased allocations to public funds while reducing allocations to equity assets and interbank certificates of deposit; although the scale of bond investments increased slightly, its proportion remained at a low level in recent years. "In Q4 2025, wealth management increased its allocation to public funds by 0.44 trillion yuan compared to Q3, reaching 1.7 trillion yuan. The proportion of public funds is expected to remain high this year," Liao Zhiming further judged that, under pressure to meet performance benchmarks, wealth management might need to moderately increase the proportion of bond holdings and extend the duration of bond holdings in the future.
Comments