Wuhan Zhongbang Bank (武汉众邦银行) (Z-Bank) has just completed a deal to double its registered capital levels.
On 16 January Z-Bank formally completed a 2 billion yuan fund-raising round that lifted its registered capital to 4 billion yuan in total.
Z-Bank is the third private bank in China, after Tencent-backed WeBank and Alibaba-backed MYBank, and to obtain approval from the Chinese authorities for a capital increase via share expansion.
The capital increase makes Z-Bank one of the top five private lenders in China in terms of registered capital.
“This capital increase and share expansion will break the bank’s current bottleneck in terms of asset scale, and raise the bank’s operating scale end service capability,” said Yan Dongshun (晏东顺).
Z-Bank’s assets exceeded 40 billion yuan as of the end of 2019, while its profits surpassed the 200 million yuan threshold, for a doubling compared to the previous year.
China is currently host to 18 private banks, with total registered capital of 54.171 billion yuan. The minimum registered capital threshold for private banks in China is 2 billion yuan.
In September 2016 WeBank increased its registered capital from 3 billion yuan to 4.2 billion yuan, while on 27 December 2019 MYBank increased its registered capital from 4 billion yuan to 6.5714 billion yuan.
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