Bank wealth management products frequently face issuance failures; fixed-income closed-end products are the "hardest hit" area.

Li Yue didn’t expect she would “win.”

所谓“中奖”，是她不久前认购的一款银行理财产品，竟然因为募资额未能达到50M元最低募资额度要求，而宣告发行失败了。有5年理财经历的她，“第一次遇到理财产品发行失败”。

在一家城商行上海地区任支行理财经理的李玥也发现，近期部分银行理财产品正被投资者普遍“冷落”。

李玥和谢铭发现，what banks find hard to sell are newly issued fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products.

According to incomplete statistics by the reporter based on Wind data, the number of failed wealth management product issuances has increased noticeably since this year. From 2026 through the end of March, more than 42 fixed-income wealth management products have already been declared issuance failures for not reaching the minimum fundraising scale requirement. Compared with the same period in 2025 (3), the same period in 2024 (7), and the same period in 2023 (9), this is a clear increase. Among them, more than 60% of the products are fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products.

Among them, China 华夏 Wealth Management has cumulatively issued 15 announcements that newly issued wealth management products were not成立, including 9 fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products. There is also one pure bond wealth management product with a shortest holding period of 90 days.

In addition, wealth management subsidiaries such as China Merchants Wealth Management, 信银理财, 光大理财, 广银理财, 渤银理财, and others have also released announcements that wealth management products were not成立.

Against the backdrop of a trend in which deposits keep moving into wealth management, why have fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products—once consistently favored by investors—suddenly become “unappealing”?

Investors’ “taste” has changed

In谢铭’s recollection, fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products—backed by higher return expectations—had long been best-selling products.

According to data released by Puyi Standards: in February this year, among newly issued wealth management products across the market, 397 were open-ended products, with an average performance benchmark of 1.85%; 1,621 were closed-ended products, with an average performance benchmark reaching 2.35%.

The reason is that fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products have longer capital lock-up periods, allowing the product investment teams to purchase medium- and long-term fixed-income investment instruments with higher yield, thereby lifting the overall returns of the products. For a time, investors flocked to this type of product.

However, since February this year, when谢铭 recommended fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products with risk ratings in the R1–R2 range and with lock-up periods exceeding 3 months, the responses he received were mostly “Do you have a fixed-income+ product that is open-ended and lets us redeem funds quickly?”

At first, he thought it was because the returns of fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products had been declining, weakening their appeal.

Puyi Standards’ data shows that as of the end of February, across the market, the average annualized yield over the past one month for outstanding fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products was 3.03%, down 0.29 percentage points quarter-over-quarter; the average annualized yield over the past three months was 2.74%, down 0.07 percentage points quarter-over-quarter.

谢铭 soon found that even if some fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products had performance benchmarks of only 1.9%, they still exceeded the one-year deposit interest rate by more than 60 basis points. Based on his past work experience, he felt deposit funds would still flow into these products.

Li Yue also chose her subscribed product because its performance benchmark was about 65 basis points higher than the one-year deposit interest rate, and she believed that a smooth issuance of the product was “not an issue.” But reality turned out to be very “face-slapping.”

Through communications with multiple investors,谢铭 discovered a factor long ignored that was rapidly affecting investors’ wealth management decisions—amid the escalation of the war between the U.S., Israel, and Iran, the global economic development becoming clouded, and increased volatility across financial markets for various asset classes, more and more investors were unwilling to keep funds locked in wealth management products for 3–6 months in exchange for continually declining wealth management returns.

Many investors told谢铭 that, to manage their funds flexibly, they preferred to subscribe to open-ended wealth management products: once international geopolitical risks cooled down and China’s stock market rebounded, they could quickly redeem the product and put the money into the stock market. Even for newly issued fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products with performance benchmarks higher than 2.2%, the shortest holding period they could accept did not exceed 30 to 45 days.

This made谢铭 realize that the rising number of failed issuances of fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products behind the scenes reflects a structural change in how wealth management funds flow—investors are starting to balance wealth management returns with fund liquidity.

Zhou Yiqin, founder of Tongsheng Consulting, said that when fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products fail to align with market demand and residents’ latest wealth management preferences in terms of product design, it leads to decreased market recognition and failure to meet fundraising targets.

The reporter learned from multiple channels that the significant increase in wealth management product issuance failures is also closely related to the market-oriented transition of the wealth management product distribution ecosystem.

In the past, bank wealth management subsidiaries were able to issue new products smoothly, mainly relying on strong support from their parent bank, which made the product fundraising success rate relatively secure. As product distribution channels continue to expand, business performance evaluations for bank distribution channels have become increasingly market-oriented. Whether it is the parent bank of the wealth management subsidiary or other bank distribution channels, today they are willing to allocate more sales resources to wealth management products that have historically performed well and are highly aligned with residents’ investment preferences. By comparison, newly issued products whose performance benchmarks are continually cut and whose capital lock-up periods are also relatively long are more likely to be “sent to the cold shelf,” and thus the probability of issuance failure rises.

Zhou Yiqin said bluntly that given that bank wealth management products require banks to invest in areas such as investment research, operations, and risk control, if the actual fundraising amount of a newly issued product is far below the scale needed to sustain product operations, it is not excluded that wealth management subsidiaries may proactively announce that the product is not成立 in order to avoid business losses.

The “aftereffects” of return ranking

For the dense occurrence of issuance failures of fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products, Lü Feng has a different insight.

As a person in charge of product department business at a joint-stock wealth management subsidiary, he has long been responsible for the creation and issuance of closed-ended wealth management products. “In fact, the issuance of closed-ended wealth management products has certain undisclosed tricks,” he told reporters. He said the so-called trick is that in the initial stage of wealth management product issuance, wealth management subsidiaries or distribution channels will seek large customers (high-net-worth individuals, enterprises, or investment institutions) to subscribe to a higher proportion of the fundraising amount, ensuring that such products are issued smoothly.

In return, during the closed operation period of the wealth management product, the wealth management subsidiary injects high-yield assets, greatly improving the product’s overall return and placing it near the top of wealth management product return rankings—what industry people commonly call “return ranking” for wealth management products.

Once the lock-up period ends, these large customers’ funds will find an opportune moment to exit and capture higher returns. Such products can also use the “return ranking” effect to attract a large number of investors to rush to subscribe, thereby achieving continued expansion of the product’s capital management scale. “In the past, this kind of operation worked every time.” Lü Feng revealed, but since this year, as regulators have strengthened oversight of return-ranking behavior for newly issued wealth management products, this gray operation has been becoming harder and harder to carry out.

Since February, he helped three fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products (all with a 6-month lock-up period) to be issued smoothly. He searched for large customer funds everywhere, but each time he encountered a “closed door.” These large customers generally believed that after the strict regulation of return-ranking behavior for newly issued wealth management products, it would be difficult for them to obtain the previously over-8% annualized returns during the product’s closed operation period, so they were unwilling to participate.

So, Lü Feng turned to the bank’s corporate business department for help, and looked for large enterprises with cash management needs to “invest” in these products. But he found that large enterprises required the fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products’ annualized actual yield to exceed 2.6%. However, the performance benchmarks of these three newly issued products were 2.2%–2.4%. To fill the yield gap of 20 to 40 basis points, the product investment team would need to readjust the capital allocation strategy—such as increasing the investment allocation to alternative assets like REITs (real estate investment trusts) by an additional 10 percentage points—meaning the product investment terms would need to be re-adjusted for disclosure. “These three products are still in the fundraising stage. Among them, two products have not yet found large customer funds to subscribe, so there is a relatively high risk of issuance failure,” Lü Feng admitted.

谢铭 found that the decline in market interest rates has led fixed-income wealth management products to repeatedly lower their performance benchmarks, which has also caused a clear negative impact on large customers’ participation in subscribing to newly issued fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products.

In the past two years, he would prioritize recommending materials related to newly issued fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products to “large customers” at bank branches (including high-net-worth customers as well as corporate finance directors responsible for cash management). Given that the annualized yields of these products reached 2.8%–3% in the past, some large customers would actively subscribe, with investment amounts in the range of tens of millions of RMB.

Since this year, because the performance benchmarks of these wealth management products distributed through bank branches have gone through multiple rounds of cuts and are generally below 2.5%, these large customers have lost interest in new products of the same series and have instead directed their funds to hybrid public mutual funds, or to bond private placement products whose annualized yield can still reach around 3%.

Breaking the deadlock measures

To reduce the risk of issuance failures of fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products, Lü Feng is looking for countermeasures.

Since March, the product department of his wealth management subsidiary has held multiple meetings, trying to identify all kinds of reasons behind the increased issuance failures of such wealth management products, and to formulate targeted remediation measures.

At present, the product department attributes the increased number of issuance failure cases to the high homogeneity of the related wealth management products, which results in a severe mismatch between supply and demand, with a very large gap between product design and customers’ needs.

Dong Ximiao, deputy director of the Shanghai Finance and Development Laboratory, believes that the severe product homogeneity and supply-demand mismatch is one of the most important reasons why the difficulty of raising funds for wealth management products has increased since this year. Especially in an environment of low interest rates and a scarcity of investable assets, the yield space of fixed-income products has been compressed, and performance benchmarks are generally below 2%, greatly weakening investors’ willingness to subscribe, which in turn leads to more failures in the issuance of newly issued fixed-income wealth management products.

In terms of investment scope, currently, the fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products issued by various wealth management subsidiaries mainly focus on allocating to short- and medium-term high-rated bonds and interbank certificates of deposit, making it hard to differentiate and widen yield gaps. As a result, overall returns of this type of product slide collectively as market interest rates decline; even some products’ performance benchmarks fall below 2%, further reducing investors’ interest.

In terms of product design, most fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products set the minimum holding period at 90 days. But when investors take both returns and fund liquidity into account, the supply of products with this design exceeds market demand, diverting a large amount of wealth management capital and leading to more issuance failure cases.

Wang Pengbo, an analyst at Broadwin Consulting for the financial services industry, believes that this reflects that the wealth management market is shifting from scale expansion to a battle over existing inventory, and product supply needs to move away from extensive issuing practices. In particular, product designs and issuance pacing that are ill-suited to the times can easily trigger risks of product issuance failure.

To address these issues, the product department where Lü Feng works has developed three solutions: within the next two months, first slow down the issuance of fixed-income, closed-ended wealth management products to avoid new issuance failures caused by product overcrowding; by the end of June, strengthen communication with various product distribution channels and establish an initial market-demand insight mechanism so they can precisely understand the latest changes in investors’ wealth management needs and develop wealth management products that are highly aligned with those needs; before the end of the year, “work on” product design—expand the investment scope by adding investment strategies such as “gold+,” “quantitative+,” and “index+,” driving fixed-income products to evolve into “fixed-income+” closed-ended wealth management products; and when adjusting product lock-up periods, compress the minimum holding period to 45–60 days.

In Lü Feng’s view, for wealth management subsidiaries, this is undoubtedly a major examination of proactively adapting to market changes. Only by optimizing product allocation, improving cooperation mechanisms with distribution channels, strengthening investor follow-up, and enhancing insight into market demand—finding a differentiated way to break the deadlock—can wealth management subsidiaries find a new “foothold” in an increasingly fierce market competition environment.

(At the interviewee’s request, Lü Feng in the article is a pseudonym.)

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