Everbright Securities Co. Ltd.

Everbright Securities holds two licences from China's securities regulator, the CSRC — one to submit orders on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, and one to lead A-share IPOs and bond offerings — and because both sit inside China Everbright Group alongside a commercial bank, an SOE client can get underwriting and banking credit approved through a single state-owned group hierarchy rather than two separate ones. That bundled approval path is what keeps large state-owned enterprise clients from leaving, since replicating it would require a competitor to acquire a separately regulated bank and then rebuild the decades of relationship hierarchies that run across both institutions. On the retail side, the business scales cheaply through digital platforms, but commission income during busy trading sessions is capped by how many simultaneous orders the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchange systems can process — not by how many staff the firm has. The whole structure depends on China Everbright Group retaining its standing as a trusted state enterprise counterparty: if an anti-corruption investigation were directed at the Group, the SOE client relationships animating the bundled package would freeze across both the banking and securities arms at once, and no amount of capital could rebuild that approval chain from outside.