At the 2026 Sustainable Global Leaders Summit, held from October 20 to 22 at the Huangpu Expo Park in Shanghai, Suning Bank Chairman Huang Jinlao delivered a speech stating that sustainable finance is now transitioning from a stage of conceptual advocacy into deep industrial integration, becoming a new central axis for the global banking industry to rebuild its competitiveness.
He noted that China's digital banks, leveraging technology to carry out inclusive and green practices, are providing fresh Eastern examples in this global transformation. Suning Bank was founded to serve small and medium-sized enterprises and consumers, and he shared relevant practices and reflections from the perspective of mutual symbiosis and mutual shaping between industry and finance.
Huang pointed out that finance has never been a tool independent of industry. In the past, when people discussed technological innovation and green finance, they often simply understood it as one-way financial blood transfusion: banks providing money to support tech innovation and green projects, with finance as the supplier and industry as the recipient. But years of practice have proven that this is only part of the picture. A truly sustainable virtuous cycle is a two-way one: finance empowers industrial transformation, and industrial iteration in turn forces financial institutions to restructure risk control, products, technology, and business models, driving finance's own upgrading. This is also the underlying logic of sustainable development.
Huang believes that industrial upgrading includes two main lines: technological innovation-driven iteration and green low-carbon-driven transformation. Both impose new requirements on finance that differ from traditional credit. The tech innovation field requires patient capital that can bear high risks and accompany enterprises through R&D and validation cycles. Green transformation is a restructuring of the entire industrial chain and cannot be separated from financial guidance. Banks can use digital technology to develop special products such as green procurement loans to serve upstream and downstream entities in the green industrial chain.
At the same time, industrial upgrading also drives the upgrading of the financial industry from four dimensions: customer structure, service scenarios, digital capabilities, and profit models. It updates customers, scenarios, data, and business models, forcing banks to transform risk control, products, and technology, achieving symbiotic evolution between industry and finance. This also aligns with the inherent logic of the two-way cycle among technology, industry, and finance.
Combining this with Suning Bank's practices, he introduced that as Jiangsu Province's first digital bank, over more than nine years since its establishment, it has adhered to digital-driven and entity-serving principles, with assets of approximately 165.5 billion yuan. It maintains an inclusive supplementary positioning, having served 1.82 million small and micro enterprises cumulatively, with inclusive small and micro loans exceeding 160 billion yuan. Its consumer finance covers 20 million basic customer groups, with cumulative consumer loans exceeding 650 billion yuan.
From 2026 to 2028, the bank has set a general tone of seeking stability and upholding integrity, focusing on its main responsibilities and core business, and shifting to a development path as a boutique bank deeply cultivating small and medium-sized enterprises. It does not pursue being large and comprehensive but delves into segmented industries, relying on industry accumulation to form differentiated competitive advantages.
He stated that relying on digital risk control and AI tools can break through industry talent constraints. Intelligent tools such as industrial chain maps, due diligence generation, and credit review compress the time for a single assessment from over two hours to five minutes, supporting account managers to possess industry-specific service capabilities. Since 2023, Suning Bank has allocated 10% of its technology investment annually specifically for artificial intelligence. It has now deployed 240 computing power cards, built a 60 Pflops computing cluster, and established seven major intelligent credit assistance tools. In 2025, the non-performing loan ratio for large loans approved with AI assistance was controlled within 1.5%.
The bank adheres to R&D first and doing certain things, focusing on domestic substitution, core industrial chains facing bottlenecks, foreign trade expansion, and supporting enterprises upstream and downstream of six major emerging industries. In addition to credit lending, it provides value-added services such as accounts receivable management, balance sheet optimization, and counterparty anti-fraud, strictly adhering to risk bottom lines.
Huang emphasized that Suning Bank is realizing its transformation from a lender to an industrial partner. The bank no longer views ESG as a face-saving project for external disclosure but embeds it into credit access, risk pricing, and business decisions, turning sustainable concepts into the underlying logic of business and truly achieving turning green into gold. He also acknowledged that technical risks in tech innovation projects are difficult to predict, environmental benefits are not easy to quantify, and there are still many bottlenecks in the two-way cycle between industry and finance that need to be resolved jointly by all parties.
In his view, sustainable development is not the responsibility of any single party. Industrial upgrading and financial upgrading are mutually prerequisite and mutually resulting—if industry is strong, finance's foundation is solid; if finance is vibrant, industry innovation has confidence. Next, Suning Bank will continue to deepen its cultivation in tech innovation finance, make good use of digital capabilities to connect equity and debt, innovate green financial products, serve industrial low-carbon transformation, and looks forward to joining hands with partners from all sectors to build a sustainable ecosystem of symbiosis between industry and finance, using digital technology as a bridge and tech innovation and green as wings.
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