Special Topic: Golden Kirin Forum · Financial New Voyage 2025 The "Golden Kirin Forum · Financial New Voyage 2025," hosted by Sina Finance, was recently held in Beijing. Experts and scholars from regulatory bodies, financial institutions, and academic institutions gathered to discuss how financial institutions can take solid steps on the path to building a financially strong nation and contribute to the prosperity of the financial industry. Xue Hongli, Director of Financial Markets, Chief Economist, and Executive Dean of the SPDB Research Institute at Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, attended the event and delivered a keynote speech on the theme of enhancing financial quality and efficiency to support high-quality economic development.
From an economic logic perspective, the core of high-quality development is to drive the improvement of total factor productivity through technological innovation and optimized resource allocation. Simply put, as the main engine of economic growth shifts to total factor productivity, the real economy's demand for financial services has transitioned from the past "volume supply" to "precision dripping." The fundamental mission of finance has also evolved from "financing certain expansion" to "pricing and safeguarding uncertain innovation and transformation." In response to this, commercial banks need to achieve innovative breakthroughs in the following three areas.
Effective planning is essential to guide the quality and efficiency enhancement of commercial banks through top-level design. Currently, China's financial system faces three major systemic blockages during its transition to high-quality development: unanchored credit expansion, insufficient local government capital, and the stagnation and accumulation of risks. These three interconnected and mutually reinforcing problems stem from a fundamental mismatch between traditional financial functions and the new growth paradigm centered on improving total factor productivity. This objectively requires a systematic restructuring of financial functions, transforming the financial system from an "accelerator of factor accumulation" into a "catalyst for the total factor productivity revolution." Through coordinated reforms, it is necessary to reshape the logic of risk pricing, build long-term capital supply mechanisms, and improve market-based risk disposal mechanisms, ultimately forming a virtuous financial cycle that supports China's high-quality economic development. Of course, enhancing the quality and efficiency of commercial banks is not merely a simple business optimization but a systemic transformation involving strategic positioning, resource allocation, and mechanism building.
Strategic goals must be aligned with the national agenda. The recommendations of the national "16th Five-Year Plan" explicitly propose to "accelerate the construction of a modern industrial system" and "promote high-level self-reliance and strength in science and technology," which provide fundamental guidance for bank strategy formulation. Commercial banks must take the national strategy as their core value benchmark, reshape their strategic objectives, and accelerate the shift from "scale expansion" to "value creation." Specifically, this means going beyond traditional financial metrics like scale and profit to establish a comprehensive strategic goal system that matches the needs of serving high-quality development, fully adapts to the requirements of improving total factor productivity, focuses on solving the three major systemic blockages, internalizes the "national priorities" into bank actions, and achieves the unity of bank value and social value.
Resource allocation must be adapted to new quality productive forces. Resource allocation is key to strategy implementation. Only by promoting resource allocation that adapts to the development of new quality productive forces can commercial banks truly achieve a precise alignment of "national needs and bank capabilities." Among these, the core driver of new quality productive forces is technological innovation, especially disruptive and frontier technologies, which demand financial resources characterized by long-term and diversified needs. The role of commercial banks must fundamentally shift from serving the "accumulation of tangible factors" and "circulation of known scales" to serving the "value appreciation of intangible factors" and "leapfrogging of unknown structures." Establishing a new resource allocation system based on "technology-scenario-value" is essential to better serve new quality productive forces.
Organizational structure must be adapted to functional positioning. Organizational structure is the carrier of strategy execution and a key lever for improving quality and efficiency. Currently, the traditional pyramid-style organizational structure is struggling to meet the fundamental demands of new quality productive forces for "cross-departmental collaboration, scenario-based services, and agile response." The organizational structure of commercial banks should be more agile, collaborative, and professional, achieving closed-loop operation driven by "industry research, pulled by customer demand, with rapid product iteration and dynamic risk management."
Optimizing services is crucial to activate the momentum for high-quality development through business innovation. For China, the key to improving total factor productivity lies in breakthroughs in technological innovation, upgrades in industrial structure, and increases in the level of openness. Commercial banks should focus on this main line, concentrate on key areas such as technology finance, industrial finance, and cross-border finance, use business innovation as a tool, and build a precise, diversified, and full-cycle financial service system to ensure that financial resources precisely drip into the key areas of the real economy.
Deepening technology finance is essential to support high-level self-reliance and strength in science and technology. Technological innovation is the core engine for improving total factor productivity, and technology finance is the "booster" for technological innovation. Only through product and service model innovation can commercial banks create a "toolkit" that fits the life cycle of technological innovation and the chain of innovation activities, paving the way for technological self-reliance and innovation from 0 to 1 and from 1 to N, thereby better serving the goal of building a strong nation in science and technology.
Strengthening industrial finance is key to helping build a modern industrial system. Industrial upgrading is the micro-foundation for improving total factor productivity. The core of commercial banks strengthening industrial finance is shifting from serving individual enterprises to serving entire industrial chains, bridging the "last mile" between financial services and industrial development. In this process, it is necessary to innovatively develop supply chain finance to better serve the goal of building a strong manufacturing nation. Specifically, banks can play a triple role in "credit hub, scenario connection, and ecological co-construction" to assist industrial transformation, upgrading, and the conversion between old and new growth drivers.
Innovating in cross-border finance is vital to support the expansion of high-level opening-up. Opening-up is an important way to force domestic reforms and promote the improvement of total factor productivity, which cannot be achieved without high-quality cross-border financial support. Only by deeply engaging in cross-border finance and helping enterprises integrate into the global manufacturing landscape can commercial banks effectively serve the goal of building a strong trading nation.
Safeguarding the bottom line is fundamental to building a solid foundation for high-quality development through digital and intelligent risk control. Under the new circumstances, the risk profile of real economic development has undergone profound changes. On the one hand, the emerging economies involved in cultivating new quality productive forces are characterized by high uncertainty and unpredictability; on the other hand, strictly preventing "explosions" has become a key focus of financial work this year, and the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries also harbor structural risks. At the same time, the services outlined in the "Five Financial Priorities" mostly target long-tail and small and micro customers, who also face problems such as information asymmetry and weak risk resilience. Commercial banks must build a new risk control model compatible with quality and efficiency enhancement, empower risk control with technology, and achieve a dynamic balance between "development and security."
Building a "data-driven" intelligent risk control system is imperative. Traditional risk control can no longer adequately adapt to the risk characteristics of the digital economy era. Commercial banks must shift the logic of risk pricing towards intangible assets like technology and intellectual property rights, evolve risk control logic from "ex-post identification" to "pre-event warning," and from "point-based prevention" to "network-wide linkage." Among these, building a data-driven intelligent risk control system becomes an inevitable choice. Specifically, for example, it is necessary to break down "data silos," integrate internal and external data resources, and create a comprehensive, multi-layered risk control data system.
Establishing a "tailored" risk disposal mechanism is crucial. High-quality development is not "risk-free development" but "controllable development." Commercial banks must avoid a "one-size-fits-all" approach to risk disposal and establish a new mechanism based on tailored measures.
Strengthening the construction of risk control capabilities through "technology empowerment" is essential. The construction and operation of an intelligent risk control system are inseparable from strong technological support. Logically, it is necessary to deeply integrate cutting-edge technology into the entire process and all aspects of risk management to improve the efficiency and resilience of risk control. For instance, by utilizing technologies such as knowledge graphs, machine learning, and federated learning, dynamic risk assessment models for different industries and scenarios can be developed to achieve real-time monitoring and dynamic warning of "related-party transactions, abnormal fund movements, and public opinion risks," enabling precise disposal and truly achieving "clear visibility, accurate calculation, and effective control."
Enhancing financial quality and efficiency is a profound self-revolution and a major test of the times in serving high-quality development. Shanghai Pudong Development Bank will work hand in hand with all sectors of society, adopting a more open attitude and more pragmatic measures to support the new voyage of the banking industry, and contribute greater financial strength to accelerating the construction of a financially strong nation and assisting in the realization of high-quality economic development!
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