CM Bank remains clear-headed: technology is not a tool for showing off, but a medium for delivering warmth through service, ultimately returning to the essence of serving people
Like JARVIS, the AI intelligent assistant from the movie "Iron Man," professional wealth management is attempting to integrate into the daily financial lives of ordinary people, bringing them more tangible value and convenient experiences.
At 11 PM, entrepreneur Wang Yu, who had just finished a cross-ocean meeting, opened the China Merchants Bank App and quietly asked the intelligent customer service assistant: "What assets can I allocate with the hundreds of thousands in cash that just arrived in my account?" One minute later, the dialogue box proactively displayed specific recommendations: fill protection gaps, increase aggressive investments, and supplement liquidity buffers. Meanwhile, corresponding allocation rationales and suggested amounts were also listed in detail. Ultimately, Wang Yu quickly completed the effective deployment of idle funds based on the recommendations and his actual situation.
In contrast to this scenario, at least three years ago, bank intelligent customer service could hardly proactively provide such efficient and professional advice. This led to situations where some users' asset allocation needs might not receive timely responses, resulting in diminished experiences.
In recent years, AI transformation has profoundly impacted all aspects of wealth management. How should commercial banks, as the main force in wealth management, respond to the rapidly changing AI world? And how should they find their development coordinates?
"Facing the AI wave, China Merchants Bank implements an 'AI First' strategy, building a 'Digital Intelligence CM Bank,' giving priority to AI capability development, taking the lead in creating AI-type organizations, and striving to become a globally leading intelligent bank," emphasized President Wang Liang at the "2025 Wealth Partners Forum" held by China Merchants Bank on August 7th. He stated that CM Bank should work with partners to be "pioneers" in "AI + Finance."
While adapting to AI development trends, CM Bank remains clear-headed: technology is not a tool for showing off, but a medium for delivering warmth through service, ultimately returning to the essence of serving people. It is this persistence that has driven CM Bank to achieve multiple breakthroughs in wealth management and other fields: retail AUM (Assets Under Management) exceeded 16 trillion yuan, retail insurance sales outstanding premiums surpassed 1 trillion yuan, and the open ecosystem expanded further...
Meanwhile, in the latest Global Bank 1000 ranking published by The Banker (UK), CM Bank ranked 8th by Tier 1 capital. Industry insiders believe these achievements indicate that, guided by the "Value Bank" strategy, CM Bank has reached new heights in deepening its comprehensive wealth management strategy, enhancing customer service capabilities, and building open platform ecosystems. Facing complex and volatile external environments, CM Bank's ability to "empower services through technology and create value through services" has become the resilience that enables it to navigate cycles.
**"Human + AI" Takes Another Step: From Assistant to Butler**
In recent years, as one of the biggest technological variables in the business world, AI is accelerating the reconstruction of various industries. However, it can also be seen that the humanistic undertone in the AI era's technological narrative has not changed, requiring coordination with concrete user value delivery points. This aligns precisely with CM Bank's long-held core values ("customer-centered, creating value for customers").
Facing the global AI wave, CM Bank chose to let technology return to the essence of serving people: not cold replacement, but humanistic extension. Following this philosophy, the intelligent wealth assistant "AI Xiao Zhao" was born.
In 2021, building on the foundation of offline relationship managers' services that had gained considerable user recognition, CM Bank began exploring professional online service models, striving to make professional, warm 7×24 hour service possible. "AI Xiao Zhao" officially debuted, marking the beginning of mobile banking's intelligent development.
At that time, relying on NLP (Natural Language Processing) and knowledge graph technologies, Xiao Zhao could solve users' common problems through preset skill libraries and Q&A databases. Although it struggled with users' free-form questions, at that stage, Xiao Zhao planted the seed of "using AI to better serve users" for CM Bank.
However, the extent to which AI's potential can be realized depends on whether it can integrate into people's daily lives "in a natural way." Making AI "take root," especially in the financial field with certain thresholds, posed significant challenges for CM Bank.
In 2023, the global AI revolution triggered by ChatGPT accelerated technological iteration. CM Bank seized this opportunity to strategically upgrade Xiao Zhao's AI capabilities: integrating internal multi-scenario service modules and professional teams, introducing foundational large models for private deployment and deep training, significantly improving intent understanding, complex problem analysis, and personalized recommendation capabilities. From then on, Xiao Zhao took a crucial step on its evolution path.
Subsequently in 2024, to enhance Xiao Zhao's professionalism in free Q&A, CM Bank developed a KFDS four-element product architecture suitable for Xiao Zhao's scenarios based on the relatively mature RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) system in the industry, continuously optimizing user experience. Meanwhile, by establishing a "human + digital" collaborative service model, CM Bank ensured that professional services remained efficient and fast while preventing service experiences from becoming mechanized by technology, achieving a dual balance of "efficiency and warmth."
CM Bank did not stop there. In 2025, Xiao Zhao's foundational model completed an upgrade to a reasoning model, with a more generalized framework and more granular skills, continuously upgrading professional capabilities. When the accessibility of financial services is leveled, more importantly, individual differences begin to be recognized. From rule-based screening to model-based reasoning, this represents a fundamental paradigm shift: from "experience-based recommendations" to "structured decision-making."
Now, by extracting years of wealth management experience from frontline relationship managers, Xiao Zhao has gradually built a full-cycle service chain covering key time points in "pre-sales, sales, and post-sales" periods. Meanwhile, using users' wealth lifecycle as the main line, it has established a comprehensive "human + AI" service system covering funds, wealth management, insurance, retirement, and other scenarios, achieving a leap from "understanding appearances" to "understanding essence."
For example, with "AI Xiao Zhao's" help, users can not only receive professional and efficient asset allocation advice like Wang Yu mentioned earlier, but also intuitively understand their financial status and personal wealth growth trajectory through the "Butler Express" by pulling down the homepage of the China Merchants Bank App: "Assets increased 13% compared to the beginning of the year, where did the growth come from," "This month's shopping expenses increased compared to last month," "How should the 1,000 yuan incoming funds be planned"...
"With the original intention of better serving users' real needs, 'Xiao Zhao' has been upgraded again, from searching information to understanding logic, then to investment advice, from single product analysis to portfolio holding analysis, from passive 'you ask, I answer' to 'proactive discovery, advance planning,' serving as both a banking expert and customer butler."
Through Xiao Zhao's evolution trajectory, we can see that wealth management in the AI era doesn't have standard answers, but has a clear direction—letting technology return to the essence of serving people, allowing professionalism to naturally integrate into daily life. When AI evolves from a "tool" to a "partner," wealth management can truly become a warm and sustainable journey.
Many industry insiders frankly state that while maintaining high technical rationality, CM Bank's most valuable quality is insisting on balancing professional capabilities with humanistic care: creating value for users through professional asset allocation and real-time companionship services, ultimately making AI truly land in financial life.
**Joint Efforts: Data Reaches New Highs, Ecosystem Expands Again**
The technological revolution represented by AI is accelerating, and its impact on the wealth management field is gradually becoming apparent. However, undoubtedly, not pursuing short-term results of instrumentalism and utilitarianism, but being people-oriented and pursuing long-term development, can drive continuous advancement in wealth management business. CM Bank feels this deeply.
Guided by the Value Bank strategic objectives, every step CM Bank takes always revolves around creating comprehensive value for customers, employees, shareholders, partners, and society. Precisely because of this, facing complex and volatile market environments and increasing operational growth pressure, CM Bank still accelerated on the "long slope with thick snow" of wealth and asset management:
Currently, CM Bank provides quality services to over 200 million individual customers, manages retail AUM exceeding 16 trillion yuan, asset custody scale exceeding 24 trillion yuan, and asset management scale approaching 4.5 trillion yuan. Meanwhile, CM Bank's retail insurance sales outstanding premiums surpassed the 1 trillion yuan milestone.
Since first proposing the retail AUM business philosophy in the industry in 2007, CM Bank took nine full years to reach the first 5 trillion yuan; the second took five years; this time surpassing the third 5 trillion yuan took only just over three years. Thus, CM Bank became the first national joint-stock commercial bank domestically to reach this milestone.
The retail data refresh to new highs relies on effective strategies and tactics. In recent years, under the clear comprehensive wealth management development strategy, CM Bank launched the "TREE Asset Allocation Service System," which can provide professional, personalized asset allocation recommendations around users' four major needs: liquid funds, stable investments, aggressive investments, and protection. This "thousand people, thousand faces" dynamic management has kept CM Bank's public fund non-monetary funds and wealth management holdings consistently in the first tier among peers.
Meanwhile, in insurance sales, based on insights into users' full lifecycle needs and understanding of big data portraits, CM Bank divides users' lives into four key stages (career startup period, family maturity period, retirement preparation stage, and golden years stage), and provides dynamically matched protection planning solutions for users at different life stages through regular digital technology reviews. This user-centered companionship service has broken away from the past insurance sales "product-oriented" selling logic, ultimately driving CM Bank's retail insurance sales outstanding premiums to surpass the trillion yuan milestone.
All of the above is also the crystallization of CM Bank's mutual prosperity with partners. "A drop cannot make an ocean, a single tree cannot make a forest." A year ago, also at CM Bank's Wealth Partners Forum, Wang Liang's statement highlighted the importance of partners to CM Bank. At that time, he emphasized the need to continuously co-build the comprehensive wealth management ecosystem.
Over the past year, CM Bank's cooperation with over 160 partners has continuously expanded in scope, with co-creation interactions becoming deeper: from channel sharing to achieve unified user experiences, to information sharing to activate cross-category synergy; from operational sharing to improve process efficiency, to investment research sharing to strengthen core capabilities... Ecosystem collaboration has gradually entered "deep waters."
Currently, as China's financial industry enters a low interest rate era, wealth and asset management institutions face multiple challenges including continuously declining risk-free rates, investment returns, and operational pressure. However, the other side of the coin is that China's comprehensive wealth management industry has developed rapidly (asset management scale reached 155 trillion yuan by the end of 2024, ranking second globally), and excellent wealth and asset management institutions will inevitably encounter opportunities.
Facing opportunities and challenges, Wang Liang believes that regardless of changes, the essence and laws of comprehensive wealth management are "unchanging": the core concept of "investor-first" remains unchanged; the business approach of creating value through professionalism remains unchanged; the basic principles of adhering to long-termism and matching risk with returns remain unchanged; the innovation-driven development path remains unchanged.
"We must both adapt to trends and adapt to you, while also maintaining our original intentions and working together, accelerating professional, ecological, international, digital-intelligent, and differentiated development, gathering new momentum for high-quality development," Wang Liang stated.
It can be seen that in change and constancy, the value propositions that CM Bank upholds are increasingly becoming industry consensus and "value centers," connecting more "leaves" in continuous upward growth. The blueprint for open, symbiotic, multi-tree wealth management has gradually unfolded, and the imagination space that excellent wealth and asset management institutions like CM Bank leave for the market may be further reconstructed and disrupted.
(Wang Yu in the text is a pseudonym)
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