China Merchants Bank, "reverse salary" from employees......
Financial involution intensifies.
1
"Reverse Wage Bargaining"
Bank employees are starting to tremble.
On the evening of December 28, China Merchants Bank issued an announcement on the resolution of the board of supervisors, deliberating and passing the "Proposal on the Recourse and Clawback of Performance Remuneration of China Merchants Bank in 2022". At the beginning of December, the board of directors of China Merchants Bank has deliberated and approved the proposal.
As soon as the news came out, it sparked heated discussions on the Internet. Some netizens bluntly said that it is the first time that the company has seen employees asking for salaries from the company.
The outside world looks fresh, but this is not the first time China Merchants Bank has done this.
According to the 2022 annual report, in order to alleviate various operational and management risks, China Merchants Bank has established a mechanism for deferred payment of remuneration and recourse clawback of performance-based remuneration in accordance with regulatory requirements and operational management needs. In 2022, 2,876 employees will be reclaimed for performance-based compensation, with a total amount of 58.24 million yuan.
If calculated based on the total number of employees of the bank last year of 113,000, the number of employees whose salaries were recovered accounted for 2.55%. Calculated, it is equivalent to an average salary refund of 20,000 yuan per capita.
Zooming in a little further, this is not an "exclusive operation" of China Merchants Bank.
Back in February 2021, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission (CBIRC) issued the Guiding Opinions on Establishing and Improving the Recourse and Clawback Mechanism for Performance-based Remuneration of Banking and Insurance Institutions, clarifying that under eight circumstances, the performance-based remuneration and other incentive remuneration of senior managers and key positions of banking and insurance institutions should be recovered.
These 8 situations cover the restatement of financial statements, falsification of performance appraisal results, and serious non-compliance or deviation from reasonable ranges of important regulatory indicators.
Against this backdrop, a number of banks have begun to recover their annual pay performance. Also in 2022, Bohai Bank will recover 17.6 million yuan of performance pay for 370 people, and the total amount of recourse and deduction from Jiujiang Bank will be 1.63 million yuan.
What's more classic is that in March this year, the regulator disclosed that during the merger and reorganization of five city commercial banks in Shanxi, 61 senior executives and key positions were retained 33.59 million yuan in performance compensation.
It seems that the bank's "golden rice bowl" is not easy to serve.
2
pressure
Employees who are "reversely bargained" are under great pressure, and China Merchants Bank is also under pressure.
The pressure on employees comes from the company, and the pressure on China Merchants Bank comes from supervision. According to incomplete statistics, China Merchants Bank has received 8 fines since the beginning of this year, with a cumulative fine of more than 40 million yuan. In 2022, China Merchants Bank received more than 40 fines for anti-money laundering and credit violations, with a total penalty amount of more than 60 million yuan.
Earlier in 2021, according to the statistics of Phoenix.com Finance's "Bank Eye", China Merchants Bank received at least 14 fines that year, with a total fine of nearly 80 million yuan.
▲ Source: Phoenix Net Finance "Bank Eye"
Looking at these fines, one can't help but question China Merchants Bank's compliance and risk control capabilities.
In addition to the large fines, the pressure on China Merchants Bank also comes from performance. In the first quarter of 2023, China Merchants Bank achieved operating income of RMB90.636 billion, down 1.47% year-on-year, net interest income of RMB55.409 billion, year-on-year increase of 1.74%, and non-interest net income of RMB35.227 billion, down 6.13% year-on-year.
You must know that this is the first time since the first quarter of 2017 that China Merchants Bank has experienced a single-quarter revenue decline.
By the third quarter, the situation did not seem to have improved. From January to September this year, China Merchants Bank achieved operating income of 260.28 billion yuan, down 1.7% year-on-year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 113.89 billion yuan, up 6.5% year-on-year.
What's more serious is that the bank's total assets at the end of September were about 10.67 trillion yuan, a decrease of nearly 72 billion yuan from the end of June, repeating the single-quarter "balance sheet reduction".
Looking at the details, the scale of customer deposits of China Merchants Bank shrank in the third quarter, and the total deposits at the end of September decreased by nearly 50 billion yuan from the previous quarter. According to the analysis of brokerage China, the last time China Merchants Bank experienced a single-quarter shrinkage in deposit scale was back in the third quarter of 2017.
From the perspective of asset quality, due to the impact of real estate, the balance of non-performing loans and overdue loans of China Merchants Bank increased compared with the beginning of the year, and the bank's non-performing loan ratio edged up to 0.96% month-on-month at the end of September.
In addition, the third quarterly report shows that from January to September 2023, China Merchants Bank achieved a net interest income of 162.286 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 0.10%, accounting for 62.35% of operating income. Net interest margin was 2.07% and net interest margin was 2.19%, down 23 basis points and 22 basis points year-on-year, respectively.
Net interest margin refers to the difference between a bank's cost of funding and operating income, which measures the bank's ability to generate interest-bearing assets from interest-paying liabilities to generate net interest income. To put it simply, the higher this number, the stronger the bank's ability to make money.
Judging from the current industry situation, commercial banks as a whole are facing pressure from further narrowing interest margins, and China Merchants Bank is no exception.
Since the beginning of this year, the total market value of China Merchants Bank has fallen out of the trillion scale, significantly underperforming its peers. The stock price has also fallen 48% from its high, nearly halving.
3
complaints
The pressure on China Merchants Bank is not only from fines and performance.
According to the data, in 2022, the non-performing balance of credit card loans of China Merchants Bank will be 15.650 billion yuan, an increase of 1.804 billion yuan from the end of the previous year, and the non-performing rate of credit card loans will be 1.77%, which is at a historical high.
Even more serious is the cascade of complaints. Previously, the "Notice on Consumer Complaints in the Banking Industry in the Fourth Quarter of 2022" issued by the Consumer Rights Protection Bureau of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission showed that in the fourth quarter of 2022, China Merchants Bank had 336 complaints about the wealth management business of joint-stock commercial banks, accounting for 14.7% of the total number of complaints of China Merchants Bank, ranking first.
On the Black Cat complaint platform, searching for the keyword "China Merchants Bank credit card", there are as many as 21,333 related complaints, focusing on arbitrary deductions, fraudulent consumption, charging high interest, violent collection, etc.
In May 2023, according to a report by Chao News, Mr. Jin, a citizen of Hangzhou, claimed that the China Merchants Bank credit card he handled was deducted many times without knowing it because of a "value-added service", and this service was opened by the bank privately as early as 12 years ago.
This is not an isolated case, on the complaint platform, there are also many consumers who said that without knowing it, they were inexplicably opened the "treasure box" business of China Merchants Bank credit card, and the payment was automatically deducted every month after opening without SMS prompts.
Behind these complaints, from the perspective of credit card non-performing asset ABS, according to the incomplete statistics of industry observer "a mutual golden goose", in 2023, 15 banks will issue a total of 16.508 billion yuan of ABS with credit card non-performing assets as underlying assets.
Among them, China Merchants Bank will issue a total of 8 ABS with the underlying assets of "credit card non-performing loans" in 2023, with a total issuance volume of 2.961 billion yuan, a record high.
▲ Source: A mutual golden goose
According to the data, China Merchants Bank credit card has more than 70 million cardholders, with a cumulative issuance of more than 100 million cards and an annual transaction volume of more than 4.8 trillion yuan. With such a large scale, does China Merchants Bank have to take these voices from users seriously?
Objectively speaking, no matter in terms of asset scale or asset quality, China Merchants Bank is still the leading joint-stock bank. In the past five years, the total assets of retail customers of China Merchants Bank have maintained a growth rate of more than 10 points. In addition, China Merchants Bank also has an extremely large group of high-net-worth customers, and the per capita AUM of private banks was once more than twice that of other banks. For this reason, China Merchants Bank is known as the "King of Retail".
But since Tian Huiyu was dismissed, the sequelae of China Merchants Bank's madness have gradually been revealed. You know, in the business world, there is never an eternal king. After all—
In the face of the changes of the times, time does not necessarily have so many friends.