84.56% Ask at the Branch. 20.64% Go by the Contract Terms.

The three numbers in one survey

Start with something that runs backwards: the source people lean on most, and the thing they least often go on when they decide, sit at two ends of the same contract.

The Consumer Financial Literacy Questionnaire Survey Report (2025) — run by the National Financial Regulatory Administration’s consumer complaints and mediation center together with China Banking and Insurance Information Technology Management Co. and Tsinghua PBC School of Finance — has three numbers worth putting side by side. Respondents could pick more than one answer on both of the questions below.

The first is 84.56%. The survey states that branches of financial institutions are the main channel through which consumers get information about financial products and services, at 84.56%, ranking first; internet channels come second at 48.24%. Note the category: “branches of financial institutions,” covering licensed financial institutions, not banks alone.

The second is 20.64%. Asked how they decide when choosing a financial product or service, 58.04% of consumers said they “decide on their own, based on experience and knowledge”; “consult a third-party professional,” “ask people they know” and “go by marketing staff’s guidance” came in at 39.74%, 35.22% and 33.38%. The two least-used were “query and compare information online and by other means,” at 21.16%, and “read the contract terms carefully,” at 20.64%.

The third is 49.95%. A separate section of the survey asks whether people read contracts at all: 49.95% read the terms carefully, 38.41% skim them, 11.64% don’t read them.

Put the three together and the conclusion is not that nobody reads contracts. Close to half say they read them carefully. The gap is somewhere else: nearly half say they read the terms carefully, while only a fifth treat reading them as what they go on.

Reading a contract and deciding by it are two different things.

What rises to the top instead is that 58.04%: deciding on your own, from experience and knowledge.

So what is that experience and knowledge worth? The national financial literacy index comes to 67.61. Of its four components, the highest is financial knowledge at 76.25 and the lowest is financial behavior at 54.28.

Broken down by age the curve is an inverted U: highest at 70.11 for the 30-39 group, falling away in both directions, lowest at 62.16 for those aged 60 and above. The section on reading contracts adds a plain sentence: “By age, younger groups have relatively good contract-reading habits, while older groups have poorer ones.”

One aside. That 84.56% gets relayed elsewhere as a measure of trust in institution branches. The survey doesn’t put it that way. What it says is that the figure ranks highest, indicating consumers’ high level of trust in licensed financial institutions and in traditional face-to-face communication. One is a channel share; the other is a reading of that share.

What the sign actually covers

Handing your trust to a sign is not, in itself, absurd. There is a real system behind the sign.

China’s Deposit Insurance Regulations took effect on May 1, 2015. The first sentence of Article 5 is short: “Deposit insurance shall be subject to a cap on reimbursement, and the maximum reimbursement limit shall be RMB 500,000.” The limit can be adjusted by the People’s Bank of China together with relevant State Council departments, subject to State Council approval. The second paragraph sets out the arithmetic: for one depositor at one insured institution, the principal and interest across all insured deposit accounts are added together; up to the cap, reimbursement is in full, and the portion above the cap ranks, by law, as a claim against the institution’s liquidation assets — not simply written off, though what it returns depends on what the liquidation yields.

Article 4 draws the boundary: “Insured deposits include RMB deposits and foreign-currency deposits taken by insured institutions.” A proviso follows, excluding interbank deposits, deposits that an insured institution’s senior managers hold at that same institution, and “other deposits that the deposit insurance fund management body specifies as uninsured” — that last category is open-ended.

The credit behind the sign comes from one word: deposits.

But the sign hangs over the door. It does not hang over every contract signed at the counter.

Walk into a branch and the trust covers the whole room — the hall, the name badges, the official seal, the ticket machine. Deposit insurance covers only part of the business conducted there. For insurance policies, wealth-management products and funds sold on an agency basis, the counterparty to the contract is not the bank.

The other half of that has to be said too: the bank not being the counterparty does not make it a bystander. Article 4 of the Measures for the Suitability Management of Financial Institution Products, in force since February 1, 2026, provides that financial institutions shall act lawfully, diligently and prudently, and that an institution bears institution-level responsibility for the suitability management of the products it sells or transacts in. Article 21 adds that an agency-selling institution must discharge suitability duties such as client assessment and suitability matching; that the mandating institution and the agency-selling institution must set out their respective suitability-management responsibilities in the entrusted-sales contract; and that where suitability duties are breached in such sales, both bear corresponding legal liability under the applicable laws, regulations and that contract.

On the rules as written, the room is supposed to draw the distinction too. Since October 2025, a commercial bank may sell agency products only through a dedicated zone in channels it runs itself, promotional material has to name the issuing partner on the first page, and it has to carry the line that the product is issued and managed by that partner while the bank, as agent, does not bear responsibility for the product’s investment performance or payout.

That is what the text requires. To the person holding a ticket in the hall, the counter, the badge and the seal are the same ones either way.

The reversal happens at a different step: the conclusion “deposits are protected” becomes the reason for “everything signed here is protected the same way.”

RMB 950

A case has been reported in the press. Every detail below is as relayed in that news report.

A 68-year-old went into a bank branch to deposit RMB 10,000. According to the article, a member of staff recommended a product, telling the customer it “pays more interest than a deposit” and that “you can take it out when the five years are up,” and the customer signed. The article says it was two years before family members checked and found that what they believed was a deposit was a whole-life insurance policy: RMB 10,000 a year, payable for five consecutive years, paying out on the death or total disability of the insured.

The article relays one figure from the policy’s cash-value table: even after paying in for the full five years and then surrendering, the policyholder would get back only RMB 50,000 in principal and RMB 950 in interest.

Five years. RMB 50,000. RMB 950.

Annualizing that takes care, because the RMB 50,000 doesn’t go in at once — it goes in over five years, RMB 10,000 at a time, each installment sitting there for a different length of time. Assume RMB 10,000 paid at the start of each year and RMB 50,950 returned at the end of year five: the internal rate of return works out at roughly 0.63%.

Against what? Posted five-year term-deposit rates at the large state-owned banks have been falling: to 1.55% on October 18, 2024, then to 1.30% on May 20, 2025. Take the lowest point in that range, 1.30% — the arithmetic most favorable to the policy.

On the same basis — five installments of RMB 10,000, each held to the end of year five — simple interest at 1.30% comes to about RMB 1,950. Even that tilts toward the deposit side: only the first installment actually sits for the full five years. Run all five at the one-year posted rate from that same date, 0.95%, and it comes to about RMB 1,425. Both are simple interest, with no roll-over compounding.

Both are higher than RMB 950.

On the numbers the news report cites, the “pays more interest than a deposit” comparison ran the other way.

The article makes a more consequential point: what surrender returns is the policy’s cash value, not the premiums paid in. It notes that a policy’s value typically takes a long while to grow past the premiums paid, and that surrendering in the early years usually returns only the cash value, which tends to be well below what has been paid in. RMB 950 is the figure after five full years of payments — pull the money out mid-way and the arithmetic is worse.

Reviewing complaints from several regions, the same article describes a pattern that recurs in those complaints: policies described to customers as “five-year fixed deposits,” returns promised above deposit rates, the word “insurance” left out, even a gift of rice or cooking oil as a lure. It says that by the time depositors notice, the cooling-off period has usually passed, and that banks and insurers refer complainants to each other while the customer struggles to get a remedy.

Why the pitch pays

Treating what the article describes as one salesperson’s problem makes the problem smaller than it is.

In October 2023, at its third-quarter press conference on banking and insurance data, the National Financial Regulatory Administration gave a figure on the rollout of its “file-and-comply” rule — which requires insurers to actually charge the commission rates they file with the regulator: by preliminary estimate, commission rates in the bancassurance channel had come down by around 30% from their previous average.

That was said as a measure of progress. It also reveals a price: a commission rate that can be cut by three-tenths in one move was higher still before. What that money was buying — access to the counter people name first when asked where they get their information, that 84.56% for financial-institution branches — is not hard to imagine.

Regulators have legislated in the same direction. Article 16, third paragraph, of the Measures for the Suitability Management of Financial Institution Products: “Financial institutions shall establish a scientific and reasonable incentive and constraint mechanism for sales personnel. Assessment criteria shall include, but not be limited to, the compliance of sales conduct and procedures, the incidence of customer complaints, and the like, and sales performance shall not be used as the sole assessment criterion.”

A regulation that goes out of its way to say “sales performance shall not be used as the sole assessment criterion” was probably not dreamed up from nothing. The regulator’s own framing of these Measures is that they move consumer protection earlier in the process. That framing is about prevention rather than an after-the-fact finding — and what a rule sets out to prevent is usually not imaginary.

The words “sixty-five or above” in the text

First, the timing. These Measures took effect on February 1, 2026. They set out what is prohibited going forward; they are not findings about any particular sale, and they do not reach contracts signed earlier.

Article 18 writes an age into the text:

“Where a financial institution sells high-risk products to, or transacts in high-risk products with, a client aged sixty-five or above, it shall discharge a special duty of care, which may include establishing dedicated sales or transaction procedures, gathering additional relevant information, strengthening disclosure and risk warnings, allowing more time for consideration, and making timely follow-up contact, among other measures.”

The second half reaches online channels: “Where sales or transactions are conducted online, including over the internet, the process shall be designed to be age-friendly, easy to use and secure.”

Article 13 of the same Measures lists conduct prohibited in the course of marketing, selling or transacting. Article 13(2) prohibits disclosure and risk warnings that are false, misleading or materially incomplete, “including but not limited to conflating deposit, wealth-management, fund, trust, insurance and similar products; promising guaranteed principal and returns in breach of the rules; or exaggerating a product’s returns or scope of coverage, among other things.”

“Conflating deposit, wealth-management, fund, trust, insurance and similar products” is one of the items the rule lists by name.

Article 13(1) covers a different technique. It prohibits “assessing on the client’s behalf, giving improper prompts, selling or transacting first and assessing afterwards, or otherwise affecting the authenticity or validity of assessment results.”

Risk questionnaires filled in by somebody else, signatures first and assessment after — a reader does not have to imagine these. They are written into the rule, item by item, as things that are prohibited.

A step earlier came the Measures for the Administration of Agency Sales Business of Commercial Banks, in force since October 1, 2025. Where a commercial bank conducts agency sales through its branches, it shall carry out audio and video recording in accordance with the relevant provisions of the State Council’s financial regulator, recording completely and objectively the key sales stages including marketing and promotion, risk and key-information disclosure, and customer confirmation and feedback; and the agency agreement is to set out the rights and obligations of both sides — an answer to the question of who to go to when something goes wrong.

These provisions all do the same thing: they shift the cost of trusting a sign away from the person signing, and onto the people whose sign it is.

Back to that slip of paper

On the account in that report, the document that went home was taken for a deposit receipt, and it was two years before family members checked and found what it was.

Through those two years the pattern the survey would later measure was already in place — 84.56% is the reason for walking through that door, and 20.64% is the share who name the contract terms as what they go on.

Pinning that gap on older customers is the easiest reading and the least useful one. The gap isn’t in the knowledge column either: nationally, financial knowledge averages 76.25 and financial behavior 54.28, the highest and the lowest of the four components.

What the new rules do is something else: they put the duty of care on the side doing the selling. If 84.56% of people really do get their information at a branch, that is where the weight lands.

The agency-sales Measures do not hedge it: since October 2025 they require a more prudent sales process, stronger management of promotion and sales conduct, and stronger risk warnings for customers aged sixty-five and above and other groups needing particular care — with no qualifier about how risky the product is.

The suitability Measures do attach one. Article 18 says “a client aged sixty-five or above” — and a qualifier follows: high-risk products. That phrase appears exactly once in the Measures, in this one article. Elsewhere the Measures grade investment-type products into five risk levels (Article 22), but never tie that grading to the phrase in Article 18.

The person in that report was 68, and that sale happened years before either set of Measures existed. Whether such a policy counts as a “high-risk product” is not something the text says.