Citic Securities, for instance, has only 673 billion yuan ($93 billion) in assets, in line with a mid-size regional bank. The simple answer is that brokers, alongside regional banks, have been major suppliers of credit to China’s companies. In China, they have become proprietary traders, which in turn use their balance sheets to supply credit to large swaths of the private sector. They penetrate deep into the private sector and into economically weak provinces where major commercial lenders such as Bank of China Ltd. are largely absent. Regional banks are big creditors to securities firms.

Source: Washington Post June 21, 2019 00:14 UTC