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Industrial and Commercial Bank of China is not only the leading provider of green loans in China, but also the top issuer among Chinese banks of green bonds in the international markets, and the most active of the Chinese banks in collaborating with domestic and international agencies to advance the development of green finance, both at home and abroad.

Industrial Bank is a pioneer in China’s green finance sector. It started making green loans in 2006 and was the first Chinese bank to adopt the Equator Principles, an internationally recognized, risk-management framework for financial institutions to determine, assess and manage environmental and social risks in projects.

Bank of Huzhou was established in 1997 in the eponymous economically vibrant, medium-sized city in east China’s Zhejiang province. With total assets of Rmb52 billion ($7.5 billion) at the end of 2018, it is a small bank by Chinese standards. Yet it has emerged as a leader (at least among the numerous regional commercial banks in China) on multiple fronts in green finance.

Huzhou city was chosen by the central Chinese government in June 2017 as “a pilot green finance reform and innovation zone”. The city quickly took a top-down approach to accelerating the development of green finance, which has proved to very effective.

Wang Yao, professor and director general of the International Institute of Green Finance (IIGF) at Beijing-based Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE), has won international fame not only for her outstanding green finance research, but also for the prominent role she has played in promoting green finance development in China. Wang started research on green finance while working in the banking sector at the start of the millennium. There, she gained first-hand experience of how green finance worked in the real world and why it was urgently needed in China.

There are many reasons why Industrial Bank beats the big state-owned banks to become the largest bank issuer of green bonds in China, but one contributing factor is its outstanding research capability.

Industrial Bank of China is known as the bank of green finance in its homeland because it was the first to begin operating by the Equator Principles, a globally accepted risk-management framework used by financial institutions for determining, assessing and managing environmental and social risk in projects.

Yin Hong leads post-doctoral, dissertation students and talks like an academic. She is, in fact, a senior banking executive and is deputy head of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China’s Urban Finance Research Institute.

Of the regional banks in China, Bank of Nanjing in the capital of Jiangsu province stands out from the crowd. The bank has lent Rmb23.7 billion ($3.7 billion) in green finance to support enterprises in their efforts to promote energy conservation, environmental protection and to reduce emissions of pollutants. Its chair is Hu Shengrong.

Among Chinese brokerage houses, CITIC Securities is not only the largest in the field, but also stands out as the leader of the green finance pack. The brokerage firm has a commanding share of the green bond market among brokers and has underwritten a large number of green finance projects that are directly issued by companies themselves.

The Bank of Communications was founded 110 years ago under the last imperial government specifically for the purpose of issuing bonds.

Industrial Bank was the largest issuer of green bonds among Chinese banks in 2018, domestically and abroad. Its guidelines and standards set out for its own green bond issues have also won recognition from international agencies.