Everbright Bank Vice President Yang Bingbing: In the whole year of 2025, technology investment will account for over 5% of operating income

Beijing Business Daily News (Reporter: Meng Fanxia, Zhou Yili) On March 31, 2025, the Industrial Bank held its 2025 annual performance briefing. When discussing the field of financial technology, the bank’s deputy governor Yang Bingbing said that over the past year, the bank concentrated its financial technology resources on key areas, using technology to empower the industry’s business transformation. In 2025, full-year technology investment accounted for more than 5% of operating revenue.

“This investment scale also fully reflects how much importance our bank places on the development of financial technology. We did not blindly spread resources across everything, but instead precisely focused on four core directions: computing power, algorithms, data, and functions. We ensure that every cent of investment is used where it matters most, providing strong support and solid guarantees for high-quality development of business across the industry,” Yang Bingbing emphasized.

Specifically, in terms of computing power, the bank follows the principle of “phased implementation, with what’s urgently needed first,” and advances both general-purpose computing power and intelligent computing power in parallel. Each has its own emphasis and complements the other—general-purpose computing power is designed for “full-spectrum adaptability,” meeting the basic computing power needs of businesses across the industry; intelligent computing power pursues “being specialized and excellent,” focusing on core scenarios such as AI applications. “What is worth noting is that 2025 can be said to be an important turning point in our computing power development. The growth rate of intelligent computing power has already far outpaced that of general-purpose computing power. Compared with last year, the increase is close to 150%. This also lays a solid foundation for us to further deepen AI application development and improve the efficiency of technology empowerment,” Yang Bingbing added.

In terms of algorithms, the bank focuses on building a “9×10” intelligent assistant matrix. “9” means it covers job duties across 9 categories; “10” means it has 10 general capabilities. The core objective is to empower employees to improve work efficiency.

Yang Bingbing introduced that, at present, this intelligent assistant matrix has covered more than 15,000 employees, accounting for nearly 35% of the total workforce. Among them, the assistants for corporate clients’ relationship managers have cumulatively generated more than 37,000 types of intelligent reports, covering the entire process including pre-lending marketing for credit-granting business, pre-loan investigations, and post-loan management. This has significantly reduced the workload of relationship managers. Meanwhile, the bank has continued to strengthen the building of a team of professional talent. Across the bank, nearly 100 people have obtained model engineer qualification certification, further enhancing the professional capability for building models. In addition, the bank is promoting large-scale applications of “AI+RPA.” In 2025, it added 610 intelligent automation scenarios in total, saving more than 1,100 person-years of labor and significantly improving operational efficiency.

Yang Bingbing said that the bank now uses the sustained growth in Token consumption scale as a core metric for measuring the depth of AI applications, thereby pushing intelligent applications to upgrade from “usable” to “good to use, and used consistently.”

In terms of data, Yang Bingbing believes that in the AI era, it is not only people using data; more often it is AI using data. And continuously accumulated high-quality datasets are the key to enabling AI to “understand, read well,” and to realize value to the greatest extent.

From a practical perspective, in 2025 the bank advanced the construction of high-quality datasets through its systems. It fully integrated various types of structured and unstructured data, including business data, external data, and metadata, and promoted the upgrade of data from “accurate and usable” to “understandable, inferable, and executable,” so that data truly becomes a core asset driving business development. At the same time, for data applications targeting frontline branches, the bank self-developed and built an interactive intelligent Q&A tool called “Wenshu” (Ask About Numbers), lowering the threshold for using data. The coverage of “Wenshu” includes more than 6,000 indicators. The number of active users is nearly 5,000. It empowers frontline business decision-making, corporate due diligence, customer acquisition and marketing, and other business scenarios to improve efficiency.

In terms of functions, the bank focuses on upgrading its core business systems and empowering key projects, using a dual-wheel drive to enhance its capacity for technology support. On the one hand, it fully promotes upgrades and replacement of important business systems such as the new-generation core business system and the new-generation integrated counter system, strengthening and reinforcing core competitiveness in key business areas. On the other hand, it works hard to support dedicated teams to advance inclusive finance, supply chain finance, and retail credit, continuously strengthening the quality and efficiency of the entire process of online customer acquisition, activation, and retention. “For example, we rebuilt the corporate inclusive finance online business process, and the average approval time improved by more than 80% compared with the traditional model, greatly enhancing customer experience. We implemented more than 30 benchmark supply chain chain projects. At the same time, we improved the level of online transformation of traditional retail credit products, built a post-loan collections system for retail credit, and realized end-to-end online operations for collections tasks such as generation, tracking, and recording, further enhancing business efficiency and risk control capability,” Yang Bingbing pointed out. Yang Bingbing noted that in 2026, the bank will continue to focus on four dimensions—computing power, algorithms, data, and functions—deepen the integration of technology and business, and continuously improve its core competitiveness.