China Everbright Bank: Creating the "Everbright Model" for Retirement Finance

The “Fifteenth Five-Year Plan” clearly states that China’s average life expectancy will reach 80 years, and retirement finance is shifting from “multiple-choice questions” to “mandatory questions.” As one of the earliest commercial banks to carry out retirement finance in China, Everbright Bank relies on its retirement finance “Everbright • Health & Joy” brand to systematically build an ecosystem-based service system covering pension finance, retirement-service finance, and retirement-industry finance. To date, the bank’s lending to the retirement industry has achieved rapid growth, its corporate annuity custody scale has remained among the top tier among joint-stock banks, it has served more than 19 million social security clients, provides more than 1,000 retirement-finance products, and Everbright Bank’s retirement finance has entered a new stage of high-quality development.

Ecological Co-building: Stepping Out of Finance to Do Retirement

Respect the elderly as you would yourself, and treat others’ elders as you would your own. In the face of profound changes in retirement finance, brand reshaping has become one of the important ways for commercial banks to convey value propositions and respond to concerns of the times. At the 2025 Everbright Group press conference on the results of retirement-finance development, the dual brands—retirement finance brand “Everbright • Health & Joy” and retirement services brand “Everbright • Nurturing & Care”—made a coordinated appearance, and released the Everbright Group White Paper on Retirement Finance (2025), presenting the bank’s solutions for retirement finance in a systematic way. As a key unit within the group for implementing retirement-finance arrangements, Everbright Bank leverages its coordinated endowment of “One Everbright,” iteratively upgrades the “12345” retirement-finance work plan, and builds a “five-in-one” service system around clients’ “five-dimensional needs,” while taking the lead in launching two distinctive coordinated service lines: “finance + medical care, wellness, culture and travel” and “bank insurance + retirement care.” Its ecosystem-based service framework of “finance + real economy” is gradually taking shape.

Under the distinctive “finance + medical care, wellness, culture and travel” feature, Everbright Bank has developed the “Everbright Enjoyment Sunshine Card” as the key interface integrating rights and interests inside and outside the group. Customers can enjoy exclusive benefits from Everbright’s pension services, China Youth Travel, Jia Shitang, and more, achieving “enjoy with one code.” Through the retirement-finance feature area in the mobile banking app, it deeply connects high-quality resources such as the group’s retirement, travel, and health offerings, providing customers with one-stop value-added retirement services.

Beijing retired teacher Aunt Wang is a beneficiary of this distinctive service. In 2025, she completed the replacement of her third-generation social security card at Everbright Bank and became an “Enjoyment Sunshine” customer. Today, she books travel products on the China Youth Travel e-travel platform to enjoy exclusive discounts; in Jia Shitang partner pharmacies, she gets discounts on prescriptions; when opening an account with Everbright Securities, she enjoys an exclusive commission rate; she can also learn about Everbright’s pension and “Everbright • Nurturing & Care” retirement projects in advance and receive move-in offsets. She has personally used more than 10 selected value-added services, genuinely feeling the convenience of “one code in hand, full of benefits.” Aunt Wang often recommends to her old friends: “No matter whether you hold Everbright Bank’s Enjoyment Sunshine debit card, or become a personal customer of an enterprise annuity, or open a personal pension account, you can all become an Enjoyment Sunshine customer.”

The coordinated “bank insurance + retirement care” service further expands the boundaries of the ecosystem. By fully leveraging Everbright Group’s integration of industry and finance and its advantages in comprehensive financial services, it jointly builds the “Everbright • Health & Joy Retirement Plan,” creating a distinctive integrated coordination model among Everbright Bank, Everbright Insurance, and Everbright Pension services. While planning wealth for customers, it also actively organizes on-site, immersive experiences and visits so customers can lock in high-quality retirement community resources in advance, achieving efficient docking between financial products and real-world care-and-health services.

This kind of ecosystem-based distinctive service not only enhances customers’ trust but also forms a unique industry advantage. Industry experts commented: “Everbright Bank’s retirement-ecosystem building is not only an innovation in its own business, but also a beneficial exploration of the development model of the retirement-finance industry.”

Three Major Areas: Professionalized Layout and Deep Breakthroughs

While building a comprehensive ecosystem, Everbright Bank focuses on three key areas—pension finance, retirement-service finance, and retirement-industry finance—pursuing deep breakthroughs.

In pension finance, Everbright Bank deeply participates in the construction of the country’s “three pillars” pension security system. In the first pillar—basic pension security—it has cumulatively served more than 19 million social security clients, and works to advance the issuance and service of third-generation social security cards, having already obtained replacement-and-issuance qualifications in 29 cities. In the second pillar, as one of the first commercial banks to obtain both corporate annuity account management and custody credentials, it has been deepening its annuity business for more than 20 years, and its pension custody scale has exceeded 500 billion yuan. In the third pillar, as a pilot bank for personal pensions in the first batch, it fully builds online and offline integrated services. It sets up a “Personal Pension” area in mobile banking, and adopts a one-stop service model of “account + features + products,” effectively helping customers steadily increase their retirement reserves.

In retirement-service finance, Everbright Bank, leveraging its professional capability in product selection, builds a rich retirement-finance product system. It has cumulatively provided more than 1,000 products, covering categories such as savings, wealth management, insurance, and funds, forming diverse options for allocation. From inspiring young people to start retirement regular investments, to stable allocation for family pillar support, and to planning and inheritance services for seniors, it delivers full-cycle companionship for customers.

In retirement-industry finance, Everbright Bank focuses on key regions such as the Yangtze River Delta and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, strengthening credit support and integrating lending with equity investment in areas such as retirement institutions, rehabilitation equipment, and smart retirement. As a result, lending to the retirement industry has achieved rapid growth. At the same time, it makes full use of the group’s strengths in integrating industry and finance, coordinates financial and real-economy resources, actively participates in the construction of the retirement ecosystem, and provides comprehensive financial solutions for the transformation and upgrading of the retirement industry.

Age-Friendly Services: More Warmth, More Trust

Through coordinated efforts across online and offline channels, Everbright Bank makes age-friendly services truly “with warmth and with trust.”

Online, it continues to build an integrated retirement-finance service system. It upgrades the “Simple & Caring” version of mobile banking, expands the coverage of the “Social Security Cloud Payment” mini-program service, and improves the experience of age-friendly and barrier-free services. In the mobile banking app, it opens two dedicated areas for retirement finance and personal pensions, bringing together asset views, retirement planning, product purchases, and rights services into one place, offering customers a one-stop solution. The 95595 “Everbright Silver Years” hotline supports remote consultations for senior clients to jump straight into manual service in seconds, having served more than 1 million people and achieved a satisfaction rate of 99.74%.

Offline, it continues to promote age-friendly upgrades at branches. Currently, more than 1,500 branches have completed age-friendly upgrade and renovation. Barrier-free service phones, smart banking service zones, age-friendly care equipment, and more are all in place. From level ground to priority-service signage, every detail aims at safety, comfort, and convenience. The “Retirement Financial Service Center” keeps expanding its coverage; it is reported that more than 100 have been built. Meanwhile, training and certification for retirement planners continues to be carried out, and the team size has expanded by nearly 500 people. The goal is to build a retirement-planner team of 1,000 people to provide personalized retirement planning for customers.

Everbright Bank has held the “Respect for the Elderly Service Month” activity for two consecutive years, coordinating with branch offices nationwide to conduct themed services such as the “Health Enjoyment Station,” the “Wealth Assurance Corner,” and “Retirement Experience Tours.” During the second event in October 2025, the country organized nearly 1,500 sessions, covering more than 500,000 senior clients participating. The brand’s warmth becomes a tangible experience that people can see and feel.

Leveraging its system-based layout in retirement finance and continuous social welfare practices, Everbright Bank has won multiple authoritative awards in succession, including Tsinghua Financial Review “2025 Bauhinia Award · Annual Retirement Finance,” and The Securities Times 2025 Tianji Award for Retirement-Finance Services, among others. Its brand influence and social reputation keep improving.

From a pioneer in retirement finance to one that goes deeper and deeper, Everbright Bank writes the answer sheet of “finance with warmth” with action, focusing on doing the big article of retirement finance well. Its solid practices not only highlight the political nature and people-centered orientation of financial work, but also become a practical model for implementing the national strategy of proactively addressing population aging. Looking ahead to the new journey of the “Fifteenth Five-Year Plan,” Everbright Bank will continue to innovate service models, expand service content, and deepen the ecosystem-based framework of “finance + real economy,” serving national strategies and responding to public livelihood concerns with professional responsibility, and demonstrating the responsibility and mission of a centrally administered financial enterprise.