Minsheng Bank has once again been thrust into the spotlight following a 2.2 million yuan fine from the National Financial Regulatory Administration's Ningbo bureau, painting a complex picture of a former "king of small and micro enterprises" struggling in the deep waters of transformation.
The bank's full-year cumulative fines nearing 80 million yuan, a year-end credit card non-performing asset "fire sale" exceeding 27.4 billion yuan, and a net profit that has declined year-on-year for seven consecutive quarters outline this challenging scenario. By 2025, the bank's stock price had cumulatively fallen 2.5%, closing at 3.85 yuan as of January 7, a more than 60% shrinkage from its peak a decade ago; according to public listings on the NAFMII platform, the bank offloaded over 27.4 billion yuan in credit card non-performing asset packages throughout the year, setting a new record for the scale of individual loan non-performing disposals by a single institution; the total amount of regulatory fines received during the year reached 79.7586 million yuan, indicating continuously exposed compliance risks; net profit attributable to shareholders for the first three quarters fell 6.38% year-on-year, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of negative growth.
From a pioneering benchmark for private banks when it was founded in 1996, to its current status as a "struggling student" with a low stock price, pressured asset quality, and frequent compliance issues, Minsheng Bank is deeply mired in multiple predicaments. The most direct manifestation of Minsheng Bank's recent difficulties is the "deceleration" of its core financial data. In the first three quarters of 2025, the bank achieved operating income of 108.509 billion yuan, which, despite a 6.74% year-on-year increase that halted the decline since 2021, saw net profit attributable to shareholders fall 6.38% year-on-year to just 28.542 billion yuan, presenting an awkward situation of "revenue growth without profit growth." This marks the seventh consecutive quarter of year-on-year decline in its net profit. What is吞噬ing the profits? The answer points directly to soaring credit impairment losses. In the first three quarters of 2025, Minsheng Bank's credit impairment losses surged to 40.165 billion yuan, a sharp increase of 28.16% year-on-year. This means that the bank's newly added 6.849 billion yuan in operating income for the first three quarters was not only completely offset by the increased credit impairment losses but also resulted in a gap of nearly 2 billion yuan. Financial commentator Gao Chengyuan pointed out that during the golden expansion period from 2008 to 2016, Minsheng Bank played its "private enterprise, small and micro, interbank" cards to the extreme, achieving rapid scale expansion through shareholder resources, branch networks, and interbank liabilities, using a "quasi-state-owned enterprise" risk control template to manage "quasi-investment banking" businesses, without corresponding improvements in risk pricing, provisioning, and accountability mechanisms. "Now, with narrowing interest rate spreads, revenue from the old model has断层ed, exposing the problem of 'excessive governance leverage': frequent strategic changes at the board level, while the risk control function has long been in a 'reactive' position relative to business lines, leading to a severe lag in risk exposure behind the accounting cycle. Simply put, the红利 brought by expansion were 'eaten away' by the weak governance structure, and now profits must be used to make up for historical欠账," Gao Chengyuan said. Accompanying the业绩失速 is the "失守" of internal controls and compliance. In 2025, fines for Minsheng Bank came one after another. On October 31, it was fined 58.65 million yuan by the National Financial Regulatory Administration for imprudent management of loan, bill, and interbank businesses, and non-compliant submission of regulatory data. Extending the timeline, from 2020 to 2024, the bank's cumulative fines exceeded 600 million yuan, with "repeated violations despite repeated inspections" becoming a difficult-to-shake label. Regarding this issue, Gao Chengyuan pointed out that the root cause is not the incompetence of the compliance department, "The business front lines are 'chasing volume' for bonuses, while the risk function only has 'sign-off authority' without substantive veto power. By the time internal audits discover problems, it's already too late. It is recommended that the board's compensation committee explicitly write 'compliance incident deductions' into the deferred compensation clauses for senior executives, with bonuses held for three years and deducted if incidents occur; secondly, regulatory fines should be linked to 'personal capital,' meaning they should be pursued even after executives leave office. Only when违规行为 can potentially罚没 an executive's retirement plan can compliance culture shift from 'forced compliance' to 'voluntary compliance'." The 27.4 billion yuan off-balance-sheet disposal of non-performing assets could be described as "scraping the poison from the bone." If fines are the "external injuries," then the deterioration in asset quality is the difficult-to-cure "internal injury" for Minsheng Bank. In 2025, Minsheng Bank launched a "clearance sale" of credit card non-performing assets, the scale and frequency of which drew market attention. According to statistics, Minsheng Bank's credit card center累计挂牌转让了 eight batches of credit card透支不良资产包 in 2025, with a total outstanding principal and interest amounting to 27.440 billion yuan, involving nearly 700,000 borrowers. Among them, the eighth batch asset package was the largest, with outstanding principal and interest of 18.464 billion yuan, involving 487,100 borrowers, all classified as loss loans, with a weighted average days past due exceeding five years. The transfer discounts for these asset packages were mostly below 10%, some even lower than 0.8%, showing the bank's urgent desire to clear out its historical baggage. Credit card business has become the "disaster area" for Minsheng Bank's asset quality. As of the end of June 2025, the bank's credit card loan balance was 449.902 billion yuan, with non-performing loan余额 of 16.542 billion yuan; the non-performing loan ratio climbed to 3.68%, "ranking high" among its retail credit businesses and rising 0.4 percentage points from the end of the previous year. This figure is significantly higher than the bank's overall non-performing loan ratio of 1.48% for the same period. It is worth noting that the transfer prices for these non-performing asset packages can be described as "cabbage prices." Among the five asset packages that disclosed starting bid prices, the transfer discounts were all below 10%, with the lowest starting bid discount being only 0.76%. Based on the average discount rate of approximately 4.4% in the first quarter of 2025, the成交价格 for just the core asset packages from batches 6 to 8 is estimated to be between 1 billion and 1.2 billion yuan, a significant缩水 compared to their total outstanding principal and interest of 26.8 billion yuan. To standardize subsequent disposal, Minsheng Bank explicitly set "three prohibitions" constraints in the transfer announcement: no violent debt collection, no entrusting collection to discredited or illegal institutions, and no resale of the asset packages; this rare clause also reflects the bank's concerns about compliance risks from the side. Regarding this "壮士断腕"-style disposal, Gao Chengyuan believes that discounts below the present value of asset recovery indicate that Minsheng Bank has abandoned the marginal收益 that continuous collection from cardholders might bring; its core motivation lies in "provision release + capital reallocation" to make the current income statement look better, but cash flow has not substantially回流 significantly. "More critically, for these assets overdue for over five years, the discount rate in the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) model is接近 zero. After transfer to Asset Management Companies (AMCs), if AMCs use methods like 'technology-driven collection' to achieve a recovery rate of 5%-8%, then the differential profit will belong to the AMC, and the bank only achieves a 'clean statement'," he further cautioned that if all joint-stock banks want to offload their historical包袱 onto the limited number of AMCs at "clearance prices," market supply and demand will quickly push up discounts, making the era of 10% discounts unsustainable. "The警示 for peers is: risks should be exposed early, provisioned for early, and disposed of at a discount early; the longer you拖延, the higher the cost; the提示 for investors is: one-time disposal gains cannot be capitalized and should not be折进 the Price-to-Book (PB) valuation." In fact, the困局 of Minsheng Bank's credit card business was foreshadowed by its aggressive expansion a decade ago. Between 2016 and 2020, the bank raced ahead with a "nationwide installment" strategy, adding over 7.6 million new cards annually on average, once ranking among the top joint-stock banks. However, aggressive customer base下沉 was accompanied by滞后 risk management. When the economic cycle turned downward and household incomes came under pressure, the risks accumulated earlier迅速暴露. Now, the "slimming plan" involving the cessation of operations at multiple credit card sub-centers in North China, Northeast China, and Central China is a bitter correction for past盲目扩张. Besides credit card non-performing assets, Minsheng Bank is also disposing of corporate non-performing claims related to companies like恒大. The 992 million yuan恒大-related债权挂牌转让 by the Chongqing branch had a starting price of only 148 million yuan, a discount rate of 15%; the 2.36 billion yuan恒大债权 disposed of by the Shenzhen branch最终成交价 was 319 million yuan, with a discount rate as low as 13.5%. While large-scale discounted disposals can optimize the balance sheet and release credit space in the short term, they also mean the bank must承受 significant账面 losses. Minsheng Bank's困境 is not an isolated case but a集中体现 of the common challenges faced by the entire Chinese banking industry during a period of deep transformation. With the advancement of interest rate marketization, intensifying financial disintermediation, and shifts in regulatory direction, the traditional deposit-loan spread model on which banks rely for survival is facing severe challenges. In the third quarter of 2025, the overall net interest margin of Chinese commercial banks fell to a historic low of 1.42%. Minsheng Bank's net interest margin performance is also under pressure, placing it in the middle to lower range among joint-stock banks. Under the "scissors差" of declining yields on the asset side and rigid costs on the liability side, relying on growth from traditional interest income is becoming increasingly difficult. Although Minsheng Bank's non-interest income saw some growth in the first three quarters of 2025, particularly contributions from bond trading, its income structure still heavily relies on interest income, making the urgency for transformation increasingly prominent. The "small and micro finance" strategy that Minsheng Bank once prided itself on is also being tested in the new environment. In the past, focusing deeply on small and micro enterprises won it market differentiation and high yields. However, during economic fluctuations, the weaker risk resistance of small and micro enterprises has led to rising non-performing loan ratios for related loans. How to leverage technology empowerment to upgrade small and micro finance from "collateral-heavy" to "data-heavy," and from "high-cost" to "high-efficiency," is a new命题 that Minsheng Bank must answer. Furthermore, in emerging areas such as supply chain finance, tech finance, and green finance, although Minsheng Bank has made some布局 (e.g., the "Minsheng E-Chain" financing余额已超 360 billion yuan), facing fierce competition from rivals like China Merchants Bank and Ping An Bank, how to build a difficult-to-replicate core advantage and form a stable second growth curve remains a long road ahead. Faced with the三重压力 of performance, risk control, and transformation, Minsheng Bank is not without action. After the leadership change in 2024, the bank pushed for resource倾斜 towards strategic customer groups, increased efforts in non-performing asset collection and disposal (disposing of 67.360 billion yuan throughout 2024), and attempted to introduce technological力量 to optimize risk control. While these measures have had some "止血" effect, they are still far from achieving "造血重生." Resolving Minsheng Bank's困局 undoubtedly requires a comprehensive革新 from governance to strategy. Industry insiders state that the primary task is to重塑 the compliance and risk culture,彻底扭转 the stubborn problem of "repeated violations despite repeated fines," and establish a strong linkage mechanism between risk responsibility and compensation. Secondly, it is essential to achieve a substantive跃迁 in risk control capabilities, building an intelligent risk control system that贯穿 the entire customer lifecycle to control risks at the source. Furthermore, a sustainable differentiated development path must be found, consolidating existing advantages while achieving breakthroughs in light-capital businesses like wealth management and tech finance. For investors, how should one assess the value of bank stocks in a "transformation阵痛期"? Gao Chengyuan proposed a clear framework: first look at the "governance discount," then look at the "asset discount." He believes that Minsheng Bank's low Price-to-Book ratio of around 0.3 times reflects the market's "triple discount" for its governance structure defects, strategic indecisiveness, and questionable ongoing capital replenishment ability, not just a discount for the non-performing assets themselves. He suggests investors set two key observation "trigger points": first, substantial improvement in corporate governance, for example, if key positions like the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and Chief Risk Officer (CRO) are appointed and managed directly by the board, rather than nominated by the president, which would signal a重构 of the risk function's independence and authority; second, a sustained recovery over multiple consecutive quarters in the metric "pre-provision operating profit / risk-weighted assets," which can prove that the bank's core profitability is not being eroded while disposing of non-performing assets. "Before these two conditions are met, any profit surge brought by one-time asset disposals is merely an 'accounting echo' and does not possess long-term revaluation value," Gao Chengyuan summarized. "The real investment opportunity lies in capturing the inflection point where 'governance premium' appears, not in speculating on the temporary lows brought by 'big bath accounting'."
