Ping An Bank step up green finance push

Ping An Bank is stepping up investment in green industries and promoting green finance development in order to contribute to national "emission peak" and "carbon neutrality" initiatives.

The national joint-stock commercial bank has elevated green finance to the strategic level and established a related office in the first half of the year, strongly supporting the development of green industries, the bank's chairman Xie Yonglin said on Friday.

The size of the bank's green finance business and its wealth management unit reached 60.22 billion yuan ($9.26 billion) as of the end of June, up 58.7 percent from the end of last year. Green credit balances hit 36.86 billion yuan, a jump of 62.5 percent from the end of 2020, Xie said at Ping An's interim results conference in Shenzhen.

The bank said it has also innovated the financial model to promote rural revitalization and invested nearly 5.15 billion yuan into industrial poverty alleviation and rural revitalization in the first half of the year, benefiting 69,000 farming households in total.

The Shenzhen-based bank recorded an operating revenue of 84.68 billion yuan in the first six months, up 8.1 percent year-on-year. Net profit of the company rose 28.5 percent on a yearly basis to 17.58 billion yuan.

The bank's non-performing loan ratio stood at 1.08 percent as of the end of June, a decrease of 0.10 percentage points from the previous year's end.