Using AI as wings to activate development momentum; Pudong Development Bank's digital intelligence strategy shows remarkable results

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(Source: Securities Daily Voice)

The AI wave is sweeping across the globe, and traditional industries are undergoing disruptive change. Even the century-old banking industry is at a critical turning point for digital and intelligent transformation. Pudong Development Bank has proven through its 2025 practices that even the most traditional and most serious financial sector can achieve a leap-like reshaping driven by AI.

Recently, Pudong Development Bank released its 2025 annual report. Against the backdrop of overall industry pressures such as narrowing net interest margins and subdued growth, it delivered an impressive set of results: as of the end of the reporting period, total assets exceeded RMB 10 trillion to RMB 10.08 trillion, up 6.55% from the end of the previous year. It entered the “RMB 10 trillion club,” becoming the fourth joint-stock commercial bank to surpass the RMB 10 trillion threshold for assets. Meanwhile, asset quality continued to improve. Non-performing loans were RMB 71.99 billion, down RMB 1.164 billion from the end of the previous year; the non-performing loan ratio was 1.26%, down 0.10 percentage points, the lowest level in nearly 11 years. This achieves a “win-win balance” of both scale expansion and risk convergence.

Data is the external expression of strategy. 2025 is a year of upgrading Pudong Development Bank’s digital and intelligent (数智化) strategy. Closely aligning with the “five major articles” of finance, Pudong Development Bank uses digital and intelligent methods, approaches, and thinking to keep high targets as a guide, high-efficiency coordination, and high-quality development, achieving its own high-quality development while serving the overall goal of the real economy.

Digital and intelligent strategy leads

Sound growth in operating efficiency

For banks, through the organic integration of digitization and intelligentization, and the deep application of technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data, new momentum can be injected into reshaping business processes, optimizing resource allocation, gaining precise insights into customer needs, and intelligently preventing and controlling risks.

Since establishing its “digital and intelligent” strategy, Pudong Development Bank has built a complete “1-5-5-5-4-3-N” strategic implementation roadmap. Over the past two years, it has adhered to steady progress and long-term efforts—sketching the blueprint and seeing it through to the end, ensuring consistent execution. With the spirit of driving in nails, it has pushed the strategy to land effectively and achieve results.

2024 was the starting year of the digital and intelligent strategy. Pudong Development Bank focused on “framework reform and breaking through in the right tracks,” completing organizational restructuring, building a保障 system, and reengineering key business processes. It achieved an effective layout of the “five tracks” business, laying a solid foundation for deeper advancement of the strategy.

2025 is the “upgrading year” for the digital and intelligent strategy. Pudong Development Bank focuses on “rebuilding the core engine and leapfrogging capabilities,” continuously increasing investment in technology resources, strengthening the digital intelligence foundation, and steadily growing the “five tracks” businesses. The core-carrier construction of the “three supers” (super platform, super products, super systems) has been fully formed. Coordinated efforts across four strategies have come into play, forming a favorable operating and development trend of “digital intelligence enabling, scenario integration, and ecosystem co-building.”

According to data, in 2025, Pudong Development Bank achieved operating income of RMB 173.964 billion for the full year, up 1.88% year over year; net profit attributable to shareholders of the parent company was RMB 50.017 billion, up 10.52% year over year, maintaining double-digit growth for two consecutive years. The cost-to-income ratio was 28.50%, down 0.66 percentage points from the previous year, and operating efficiency improved markedly.

Strengthening the AI foundation

Doing well in the “five tracks”

At the 2025 annual results briefing, Chairman Zhang Weizhong disclosed a set of “technology attributes” figures: Pudong Development Bank has invested in building a thousand-card computing power cluster and has developed its own “Puyin Zhiiqi” model matrix, enabling coordination and empowerment across models of different sizes. This can provide precise and intelligent support for various business scenarios. As for the data: by the end of 2025, more than 200 AI application scenarios have been deployed, covering intelligent risk control, intelligent marketing, and more.

From this perspective, Pudong Development Bank is approaching a “data- and computing-power-driven” technology platform-type organization. In the digital and intelligent transformation, computing power is the foundation, models are the core, and scenarios are the key. The five tracks—technology finance, supply chain finance, inclusive finance, cross-border finance, and treasury and capital management finance—are precisely the main areas where Pudong Development Bank’s digital and intelligent strategy is deeply implemented at the business level.

Technology finance is Pudong Development Bank’s “first track” in its digital and intelligent strategy. Technology enterprises generally have characteristics such as light assets, high growth, and high risk, making traditional bank credit evaluation systems difficult to effectively assess their credit value. Pudong Development Bank innovated its “Group Big Sci-Tech” service system, building an operating model of “commercial banking + investment banking + ecosystem,” improving the “5+7+X” product system, and upgrading the intelligent digital platform “Moxiangyu” to version 3.0.

At the same time, the bank has built its own “technology five-forces model.” By integrating multidimensional data such as companies’ industrial and commercial information, intellectual property data, R&D investment, and talent teams, it establishes an intelligent risk assessment model, enabling a shift from “looking at bricks” to “looking at patents.” As of the end of the reporting period, Pudong Development Bank’s technology finance loan balance (per the statistics definition of the People’s Bank of China) reached RMB 1.05 trillion, serving more than 256,000 technology enterprises; it served more than 80% of listed technology enterprise companies nationwide.

The difficulty of inclusive finance lies in the “last mile.” How can limited human resources serve a huge number of small and micro customers? How can risk be controlled while maintaining business efficiency? Pudong Development Bank’s answer is still digital and intelligent enablement. The bank enhances its online and offline capabilities for refined services. Relying on two major super platforms—“Puhui Lai” and mobile banking—it provides one-stop services for small and micro customers, iterating the “Puhui Loan” digital product matrix, implementing the construction of small and micro and consumer loan centers across the country’s branches, and promoting intensive and efficiency-enhancing growth for inclusive finance business.

In addition, the bank is building an end-to-end AI vertical large-model for inclusive finance. Using intelligent technologies, it enables precise customer profiling and risk pricing for small and micro enterprises, so customers benefit, customer experience is better, and grassroots operations run more smoothly. In terms of data, by the end of 2025, Pudong Development Bank’s inclusive finance “two-increase” loan balance was RMB 523.991 billion, up 12.51% from the end of the previous year. The increment hit a new high in nearly four years, ranking second among joint-stock banks in terms of annual incremental volume.

With digital and intelligent enablement, Pudong Development Bank’s supply chain finance track achieved rapid business breakthroughs. The review process was shortened from “hour-level” to “minute-level,” with an accuracy rate of 80%. Over the full year, it cumulatively served 37,408 upstream and downstream supply chain customers, up 97.76% year over year. In cross-border finance, service boundaries continued to expand. It strengthened the “Shanghai-Hong Kong, Shanghai-Singapore, Shanghai-London” three-line linkage, with full-year cross-border RMB receipts and payments volume of RMB 1.61 trillion, up 18% year over year; cross-border transaction settlement volume was RMB 0.449 trillion, up 44% from the previous year. The treasury and capital management finance track achieved full-domain linked integration, refreshing its wealth management platform super system. It managed individual AUM balances (including market value) of RMB 0.466 trillion, up 20.26% from the end of the previous year; the group’s subsidiaries’ asset management scale was RMB 0.336 trillion, up 23.66% from the end of the previous year.

Powering the “three supers”

Upgrading the intelligent bank in multiple dimensions

2026 is the opening year of the “15th Five-Year Plan” (十四五）? starting? Actually “十五五” is the “15th Five-Year Plan” in Chinese, but keep as is? -> Translate: “the 15th Five-Year Plan” start. Therefore: 2026 is the opening year of the “15th Five-Year Plan.” Pudong Development Bank has defined it as a “year of comprehensive strategic deepening” and proposed a 20-character guideline: “Strategy-driven, tactics aligned, technology-led, cultural保障, and group coordination.” Behind this statement is, in fact, a deeper shift: from “doing project-based digitization” to “building a systemized intelligent bank.”

The key lever supporting this transformation is the “three supers,” namely the super platform, super products, and super system: ensuring that “data flows, information flows, and value flows” realize closed-loop circulation on the super platform. What customers face is no longer isolated products one by one, but a service ecosystem that can “solve problems in one stop.” On the “super platform,” it reshapes the product system with “scenario-based + standardized + intelligent” approaches, creating a batch of “super products” with market recognizability. The super system is responsible for enabling “real-time data circulation, dynamic risk control, and intelligent operational coordination.”

It is not hard to see that through the linkage of these “three supers,” Pudong Development Bank aims to systematize and scale dispersed digital intelligence capabilities, truly transforming them into a replicable and sustainable growth engine. Imagine this boldly: in the business domain, in the future, AI will move from single-point applications to embedding across the entire process, realizing end-to-end intelligence across “customer acquisition—risk control—approval—post-loan management.” In the organizational domain, the head office, branches, business segments, and the group will coordinate via AI to form an “integrated campaign” capability. In the ecosystem domain, through deep collaboration with leading companies in the industrial chain and technology enterprises, the bank will shift from “a provider of funds” to “an industry service provider and ecosystem builder”… Under this vision, the boundaries of traditional banking will be redefined, and a new type of intelligent bank is being refined, carved, and created at Pudong Development Bank.

Even more worth noting is that while pushing technological change, Pudong Development Bank continues to repeatedly emphasize “value orientation.” “Relying on the outcomes of the digital strategy, we will build a high-quality value bank, achieving coexistence and mutual prosperity between our own value creation and customers’ value growth.” At the performance meeting, Zhang Weizhong emphasized that when Pudong Development Bank chooses to redefine financial services with “AI-native thinking,” what it ultimately points to is the bank’s vision, mission, responsibilities, and commitments—serving the real economy and staying true to the original intention of safeguarding finance for the people.

From strategic implementation to practical rollout to deeper advancement—from a computing-power foundation to scenario applications to “super” coordination—from business breakthroughs to value enablement to potential excavation—Pudong Development Bank has validated a distinctive digital and intelligent transformation path over three years.

In 2026, Pudong Development Bank stands on a new starting point with assets规模 of RMB 10 trillion. Pudong Development Bank states that it will continue to take digital intelligence flight as its wing, further develop the “five tracks,” serve the real economy through the “five major articles” of finance, and serve the real economy with higher standards and more concrete measures. It will firmly and unswervingly follow the path of financial development with Chinese characteristics, contributing greater strength to advancing the building of a strong financial nation.

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