On July 28, CM Bank issued an announcement stating that the National Financial Regulatory Administration had approved the qualification of Wang Xiaoqing as the bank's president, with his term taking effect immediately and lasting until the end of the 13th Board of Directors.
As early as April 30, Miao Jianmin presided over the CM Bank board meeting, which reviewed and approved the appointment of Wang Xiaoqing as the bank's president. At the annual shareholders' meeting on June 25, the new president completed his first public appearance. During the meeting, he revealed that the CM Bank board had reviewed the "15th Five-Year Plan" strategic plan, and the next step would be to drive its implementation and refinement, deepen core business, remove execution bottlenecks, and fully mobilize employee energy.
The position of CM Bank's president has always been a highly scrutinized and important role. With predecessors like Wang Shizhen, Ma Weihua, Tian Huiyu, and Wang Liang setting high standards, the pressure on the fifth president is considerable. Unlike the economic up-cycle faced by the first three presidents, Wang Liang and Wang Xiaoqing must lead CM Bank through a cycle and fight a "tough battle." Now, with Wang Liang retiring, the responsibility has fallen on Wang Xiaoqing's shoulders.
Even the "Retail King," CM Bank, faces multiple internal and external pressures in the current economic environment: internally, retail profitability and asset quality are entering an adjustment cycle; competition in wealth management among peers is intensifying; and in the long term, net interest margin pressure is significant, with deposit costs, though better than peers, facing downward resistance. For a new leader, one who had no prior banking management experience before joining the CM Bank system, how will Wang Xiaoqing find the right balance between stable operations and business innovation?
The First Asset-Management-Origin President of the Retail King
The "Retail King" was not built in a day. Since its founding in 1987, CM Bank has had five presidents. The first president, Wang Shizhen, oversaw the bank's establishment in Shekou, Shenzhen, serving for 12 years and completing the bank's initial creation from scratch. He implemented the early president-responsibility system under board leadership and launched China's first multi-currency, multi-deposit-type, multi-function debit card in 1995, laying the foundation for CM Bank's retail development. The bank's early years left a legacy of significant non-performing assets. When Ma Weihua took over as the second president in 1999, he faced the arduous task of averting a crisis. Under his leadership in 2002, CM Bank issued what is considered the first true commercial bank credit card in China. Two years later, Ma Weihua's strategic judgment, "No corporate business, no food today; no retail business, no food tomorrow," remains a classic quote. In an era when the entire industry focused on corporate lending, CM Bank was the first to choose its path, elevating retail business to the bank's core strategy and soaring. During Ma Weihua's 14-year tenure, the "Retail King" reputation was firmly established, creating a solid competitive foundation for the bank.
In 2013, Ma Weihua retired at the age limit. The third president, Tian Huiyu, inherited the retail strategy, drove the "Light Bank" transformation, and initiated the wealth management era. He moved away from "scale supremacy," reduced capital consumption, and vigorously developed off-balance-sheet and intermediary businesses, transitioning from a heavy-asset credit bank to a light-capital, comprehensive financial services provider. He formally elevated large wealth management to the bank's top-level strategy, advancing CM Bank from a retail bank to a wealth management bank. In April 2022, Tian Huiyu was investigated. In the darkest moment when CM Bank's market value evaporated by over 80 billion yuan in a single day, Wang Liang, a veteran who grew up within the bank, was promoted to the fourth president. At the same time, the overall banking environment underwent a significant shift, with net interest margins continuously narrowing, asset quality pressure surging, and non-performing loan ratios rising. Against this backdrop, Wang Liang proposed the "Value Bank" and "Four Transformations" strategies. Compared to Tian Huiyu's era of strategic breakthroughs, Wang Liang's four-year tenure focused on stabilization and repair, advocating that "running a bank is a marathon, not a sprint." He continued to deepen the wealth management main line, improve the internal control system, and optimize the business structure. His term ended on April 30, 2026, when this 60-year-old veteran stepped down. With this, CM Bank entered the "Wang Xiaoqing Era."
News of Wang Xiaoqing becoming CM Bank's fifth president caused considerable surprise in the industry. He is the first CM Bank president with a background solely in asset management. Wang Xiaoqing's early career was diverse: he worked for two years at the Agricultural Bank of China, then held positions at several securities firms, and also had early experience at the China Securities Regulatory Commission. After joining PICC Asset Management in 2005, he spent 15 years there, deeply involved in asset allocation and investment risk control. In 2020, Wang Xiaoqing left the PICC system and joined the China Merchants Group financial system, first leading China Merchants Fund, then serving as CM Bank's president assistant and vice president, briefly holding the top post at the Shenzhen branch. In July 2023, he became a vice president of CM Bank, concurrently serving as chairman of China Merchants Fund, CMBC Life, and CMBC Asset Management. In May 2025, after Zhu Jiangtao resigned, Wang Xiaoqing became the first-ranked vice president. In June 2025, he was elected as an executive director at the 2024 annual general meeting, entering the core decision-making layer. On August 4, 2025, he resigned from his vice president role at CM Bank to become the party secretary and general manager of China Merchants Financial Holdings. This entity is a subsidiary of China Merchants Group, the first central enterprise financial holding company within the SASAC system and the first in the Greater Bay Area. Wang Xiaoqing's leadership at China Merchants Fund is understandable, as it's within the asset management field, and he performed well there. During his tenure (2020-2025), the company's management scale expanded. At the end of 2020, non-money market fund assets under management were 352.256 billion yuan, growing to 575.568 billion yuan by the end of 2023, ranking fourth in the industry. Total assets under management reached 1.55 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4.85%. By the end of 2024, non-money market fund scale was 557.425 billion yuan, dropping to ninth place. By the end of the first quarter of 2025, public fund management scale exceeded 930 billion yuan. According to Haitong Securities' long-term performance statistics, the long-term returns of its equity funds over 1, 2, 3, and 5 years were all in the top 30% of the industry. The exam has now changed from managing a single asset management platform to running the entire bank. Some industry insiders believe that given the severe internal competition in banking, simply breaking through from a traditional banking perspective might not yield new stories. A president familiar with asset management might bring unexpected surprises.
The Triple Pressures on Wang
As Wang Xiaoqing officially takes the helm of CM Bank, the bank faces multiple tests from the downward cycle and intensifying industry competition. The flagship retail business and long-term profitability are showing pressure, requiring the new president to balance strategic continuity, risk control, and business innovation. The core difficulties are reflected in the following areas.
First, profitability is constrained long-term, with net interest margins continuously narrowing, squeezing growth space. CM Bank's net interest margin was 2.15% in 2023, 1.98% in 2024, 1.87% in 2025, and further declined to 1.83% in the first quarter of 2026, a cumulative decline of 32 basis points since 2023. The repricing of existing mortgages lowers loan yields, and the trend of deposit term erosion continues to eat away at CM Bank's competitive advantage of low-cost demand deposits. At the end of 2025, demand deposits accounted for 50.79% of customer deposits, down 1.45 percentage points year-on-year; the average daily balance of demand deposits for the full year was 49.40%. Given its business structure, which is heavily reliant on retail credit, CM Bank is more significantly impacted by the narrowing spread, and simply expanding scale cannot offset the earnings pressure.
Second, the asset quality of retail credit is cyclically weakening, increasing risk control pressure on the core business. At the end of 2025, CM Bank's retail loan non-performing loan (NPL) ratio was 1.06%, rising to 1.14% in the first quarter of 2026, with retail NPL balances exceeding 41.3 billion yuan. Retail loans account for nearly 50% of CM Bank's total loans. Against the backdrop of continued household sector deleveraging, the trend in retail asset quality is diverging from corporate business. Continuously increasing credit impairment provisions are squeezing profits. The credit card business, once a growth pillar, is also under pressure. At the end of 2025, the credit card loan balance was 938.991 billion yuan, shrinking to 900.417 billion yuan in the first quarter of 2026, with the NPL ratio rising from 1.74% to 1.90%. In 2025, total credit card transaction volume fell 7.62% year-on-year, with revenue contracting, and the business has entered a phase of risk control and scale stabilization.
Third, while CM Bank's core large wealth management indicators continue to show high growth, industry competition is intensifying, making it harder to achieve incremental breakthroughs. The 2025 annual report shows that CM Bank's retail AUM broke through 17.08 trillion yuan for the first time, with large wealth management income reaching 44.013 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 16.91%. This growth continued into the first quarter of 2026, with wealth management fee and commission income reaching 8.507 billion yuan, up 25.42% year-on-year, including a 55.11% surge in agency fund income. CM Bank's large wealth management income includes fee and commission income from wealth management, asset management, and custody services. This is precisely the "comfort zone" of the fifth president, Wang Xiaoqing. It may help CM Bank hedge against the trend of declining net interest margins and drive a second growth curve by increasing the proportion of non-interest income. Facing cross-border competition from internet platforms and intense pressure from peers, Wang Xiaoqing acknowledged in his first public appearance at the June 2026 shareholders' meeting that internet platforms are important participants in the wealth market, both as partners and, in some areas, competitors. He pointed out that the core difference between CM Bank and internet platforms lies not in product sales, but in the full-process asset allocation service system: from precise customer profiling, customized asset allocation plans, and selection of long-term excellent products, to dynamic risk monitoring, full-process customer companionship, and iterative portfolio optimization, forming a closed-loop service capability. Wang Xiaoqing stated, "The core of wealth management is asset allocation based on the client's true risk and return preferences. This is where CM Bank invests the most in the wealth management field." The operational pressures brought by the industry cycle are also an internal driving force for transformation and change. The "multi-faceted" Wang Xiaoqing will continue to lead CM Bank's exploration. The effectiveness of the retail leader's transformation and its future development potential still require time to be verified.
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