191,700 enterprises, 1.32 trillion in financing: The industrial finance revolution in the China Construction Bank annual report

When credit gets stuck in a deadlock within the intricate network of an industrial supply chain, Bank of Communications’ 1.32 trillion-yuan practice shows that the real solution lies in using a digital platform to rebuild the credit allocation mechanism.

By | Huamao Rong Finance Content Team

Produced by | Trade Finance

Bank of Communications’ 2025 annual report reveals the scale of this transformation. It has cumulatively provided 1.32 trillion yuan in financing to 191,700 chain-linked enterprises across 6,594 digital supply chains. These figures first signal a leap in scale, but more deeply, they mark the reshaping of the core of credit.

The way banks assess risk is shifting away from static “profiles” based on collateral and the creditworthiness of counterparties, and toward attempting to “decode” the real-time transaction flows and data flows surging across the supply chain. Under traditional models, credit is unable to reach end-stage small and micro businesses due to information silos.

The “Circle-Chain-Qun” service model explained in the annual report by Zhang Yi, President of Bank of Communications, is a direct response to the dilemma above. Its core logic is to penetrate industrial barriers through a digital platform and convert the credit of core enterprises into data assets that can be shared across the supply chain.

A Risk-Control Revolution: From Counterparty Credit to Transaction Credit

When observing the “Circle-Chain-Qun” model, its most prominent breakthrough is the shift in risk-control logic. The coordinates for risk assessment are no longer anchored to the core enterprise’s own credit rating.

Instead, they begin to extend along the “trajectories” of real-time data flowing across the entire industrial supply chain.

The practice of the Shenzhen Huacai seafood platform clearly demonstrates this shift path. Under traditional fisheries financing, risk control keeps a close watch on collateral and guarantees.

But here, from the entire chain information—including frozen-product squid from catch, traceability, cold-chain handling, to trade—gets converted in real time into dynamic credit data. In the traditional model, the value of one fish congeals when it leaves port.

Yet in the data network co-built by Bank of Communications and Huacai, its value continues to “grow” with each circulation and each trade confirmation, generating credit limits in real time.

A processing enterprise owner remarked that those transaction traces that used to be invisible to banks have now become the hardest form of “digital assets.” In the first quarter of 2025, the 98.45 million yuan “Blue Sea Inclusive Loan” issued based on this dynamic data map is, in essence, a large-scale pricing of this new kind of asset.

The foundation of risk control is moving from a static balance sheet to data streams that never stop.

A Digital Platform Builds a Closed-Loop Industrial Ecosystem

Credit penetration requires a carrier. And a digital platform deeply embedded in an industry plays the role of basic infrastructure for reconstructing the supply-chain governance structure.

Bank of Communications’ strategy is not simply to offer online products. Instead, it chooses to co-build with, or connect to, the online platforms of industrial-leading companies, aiming to achieve a trustworthy integration of funds, information, logistics, and merchant flows.

For long-standing pain points in coffee trade where documents and the rights to goods are unclear, the solution from the Shanghai branch of Bank of Communications is to build an untamperable “data mirror.” Its “Coffee Production Internet Service Platform,” using blockchain technology, creates a parallel “digital twin” for each batch of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee beans.

From plantation information to the inbound-records at Shanghai bonded warehouses, every handoff in the physical world is synchronized onto the chain with non-reversible credentials. This means that an electronic bill of lading itself constitutes a full, trustworthy proof of the rights to goods.

The project lead, Ma Xiaoyan, pointed out that this enables the bank to examine the full picture of trade “as if through a lens.” The core of this mechanism is that the authenticity of trade context no longer depends on manual verification “trust,” but on “verification” guaranteed by mathematical algorithms.

The 440 million yuan “Mocafe Loan” issued after the platform went live has its cornerstone in this. The bank’s role has therefore changed.

From an external funding provider, it becomes a co-drafter of rules within the ecosystem and a provider of trustworthy foundational infrastructure.

The “De-Core” Model Unlocks the Credit Potential of Core Enterprises

Traditional supply-chain finance’s rigid reliance on core enterprises to establish enforceable rights or provide guarantees creates a bottleneck for scaling up. The innovation of Bank of Communications’ “De-Core Chain Lending” series lies in the essence of “relying on but not depending on.”

This is, in essence, a refined operation of the credit value of core enterprises and a reallocation of risk responsibilities.

In the Sichuan Quanxing Liquor case, Bank of Communications’ Chengdu Eighth Sub-branch implemented the first “De-Core Chain Lending-eSales Pass” transaction in the nationwide Bank of Communications system. Under traditional models, core enterprises guarantee financing for downstream distributors, which directly adds to their on-balance-sheet liabilities or contingent liabilities.

Under the “De-Core” model, through Bank of Communications’ independent data risk-control system, the real transaction order data of Quanxing Liquor—not its guarantee letter—is used as the decision-making core. As a result, the weight of transaction data in the bank’s risk decision models increases significantly.

Distributors can obtain financing based on valid purchase orders, while core enterprises do not need to provide traditional joint-liability guarantee. This not only accelerates cash flow recovery, but more fundamentally, it decouples the core enterprise’s “credit capability” from its “balance sheet.” This allows its credit to radiate across the entire network more safely and efficiently, while also optimizing its own financial structure.

Precision “Drip Irrigation” of Inclusive Finance Driven by Data

The ultimate goal of the “Circle-Chain-Qun” model is to achieve precise drip irrigation of financial liquidity within an industrial ecosystem. Its key lies in turning multi-dimensional data into accurate customer profiles and risk-control models.

This touches the core of supply-chain data governance and value extraction.

In Hunan, the Hengyang branch of Bank of Communications and Zhengda Group cooperate to extend the risk-control reach to the very front end of production management. Relying on the “Pig Doctor” platform, more than a hundred real-time IoT data points from pig farmers—such as the number of pigs in stock, body temperature, feed intake, and vaccine records—are converted into credit assets.

This goes beyond traditional financial data and moves into the layer of real-time management data within the production process. It enables risk control to give early warnings for diseases and judge efficiency in advance.

As a result, the approval process is compressed from weeks to the shortest two days after onlineization and model-based automatic approval. The scale of on-chain financing reached 103 million yuan, with no overdue payments for more than two years.

In an industry like breeding—where standardized financial statements are lacking—this risk-control performance practically demonstrates a viewpoint: when IoT data in the production process is sufficiently continuous and真实, its risk prediction capability in specific scenarios may surpass traditional, lagging financial data.

In Chongqing, Bank of Communications’ Chongqing branch, around the industrial supply chain of intelligent connected new-energy vehicles, has launched a “Chain-Enterprise Loan” (Chainqi Dai), demonstrating model-based capabilities for integrating multi-dimensional data.

By integrating evaluation data such as cooperation years, order stability coefficients, and procurement concentration, along with closed-loop capital-flow information, the bank builds precise profiles for more than 1,000 micro and small enterprises on the chain. In 2025, it provided financing of 1.752 billion yuan in total.

A scalability challenge for this model lies in the heterogeneity of “key credit variables” across different industries. The success core is that banks and industrial-leading enterprises must jointly complete the identification, datafication, and model-ization of these variables.

The 1.32 trillion-yuan implementation of the “Circle-Chain-Qun” model is not significant merely because of its scale. Its milestone value is in validating a pathway: the bank’s ability to price risk is upgrading from financial insight into a single enterprise’s counterparty credit to data insight into the entire industrial ecosystem.

However, as the “Circle-Chain-Qun” model is verified as effective across different industries, a more fundamental constraint starts to surface. Its promotion boundary—does it depend on the technologies themselves, such as blockchain and the IoT? Or does it depend more on the granularity of underlying data in different industries and the core enterprises’ willingness to open up digitally?

In sectors where trade data is clear, like coffee and baijiu liquor, credit can “penetrate” smoothly. But in industries with non-standard data, long supply chains, or weak digital willingness among core enterprises, the “data mapping” of credit remains a hard task.

Bank of Communications’ exploration shows that the ultimate competition in industrial finance may no longer be a competition of financial products. Instead, it may come down to who can better lead or integrate into the data generation and governance standards of key industries.

Should these “credit oases” be connected, or allowed to become even larger “data islands”? This is the ultimate question left for industry and finance together after 1.32 trillion yuan.

As we enter the opening year of the “15th Five-Year Plan” period (2026-2030) and begin a new planning cycle, supply-chain finance shoulders key missions in serving the modernization of the industrial system and developing new quality productive forces. Against this backdrop, the 12th China Supply Chain Finance Annual Conference 2026 is timely and will convene to gather the wisdom of the industry. Guided by national strategies, the conference will deeply discuss a series of core topics, including how state-owned enterprises acting as “chain leaders” can empower the entire supply chain, and new solutions for cross-border finance in the context of RMB internationalization. Together, it will explore feasible paths for providing precise financial services to the real economy and supporting industrial upgrading.

This conference will directly face the industry’s most cutting-edge practical challenges and innovative thinking. From penetrating the “cargo rights” blind spots through digitization of bulk commodities, to new financial models adapted for trade in new-energy metals; from designing “industry-finance-data” closed loops for municipal financing vehicles and park platforms, to analyzing differentiated risk-control logics in live-stream e-commerce supply chains; from responding to new compliance challenges brought by “penetration-based regulation” and the Golden Tax Phase IV, to discussing how the “balance sheet inclusion” of data assets reshapes risk-control pricing—topics closely revolve around three major main lines: digital transformation, industrial change, and regulatory evolution. The aim is to clarify the future trends in risk management, technology integration, and ecosystem co-building.

This is a value-connection event focused on real questions and finding new answers. You will hear interpretations of policy frontiers, learn from the breakthrough solutions of benchmark enterprises, and engage in deep exchanges with all sides of the ecosystem. Whether it is regional small and medium-sized banks exploring differentiated competitive strategies, or all parties jointly balancing innovation and compliance in practice, sparks will fly in the dialogues. The “2026 12th China Supply Chain Finance Industry Benchmark Awards,” held concurrently, aims to pay tribute to outstanding practitioners who have emerged in solving these industry challenges. We sincerely invite you to join us; on April 8, 2026, meet in Beijing, and draw a new blueprint for industry development together with colleagues in the industry.

This is an important industry exchange event in the field of supply-chain finance. We sincerely invite you to attend, discuss development, and contribute to progress in the industry.

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