Banks Close WeChat Mini-Programs, Integrate into Mobile Banking to Cut Costs and Risks

Several banks have recently announced the closure of some of their WeChat mini-program business services, integrating their functions into a unified entry point. Since the start of this year, a number of large, mid-sized, and local small banks have successively taken down WeChat mini-programs. Earlier, the closure and integration of direct banking and credit card apps had already begun, with related services gradually returning to mobile banking apps.

Over the past decade, the basic approach of banks to digitalization was to "open multiple entry points" — apps, mini-programs, official accounts, and lifestyle accounts — placing themselves wherever there was traffic, on the assumption that more entry points meant greater opportunities to reach customers. The cost-side problem is that many of the early apps and mini-programs have significant functional overlap with mobile banking apps, yet have low activity levels, while each consumes the bank's investment in development, operations, and security. The risk-side pressure is more direct: in the past two months, several bank apps and mini-programs have been reported by regulators for illegally collecting and using personal information, with opaque privacy policies and inadequate control over third-party plugins being frequent issues. The more scattered the entry points, the larger the risk exposure.

Commercial bank mini-programs are parasitic on the ecosystems of third-party platforms, and their lightweight architecture makes it difficult to fully meet requirements such as financial-grade encryption, traceability of sales conduct, and anti-money laundering checks, while the data flow is not entirely under the bank's control. Regulatory attitudes are clear: in September 2024, the National Financial Regulatory Administration required financial institutions to reasonably control the number of mobile applications, and to promptly optimize, integrate, or terminate applications with low activity, poor user experience, redundant functions, or high security and compliance risks. In July 2026, the People's Bank of China, the National Financial Regulatory Administration, the China Securities Regulatory Commission, and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange jointly drafted the "Measures for the Cybersecurity Management of the Financial Industry (Draft for Comments)" for public consultation, further systematizing requirements for data classification and grading, personal information protection, and supply chain security. This round of "subtraction" in entry points by banks is both a market choice and a regulatory direction. The focus of digital competition is shifting from "channel quantity" to "channel quality."

The criteria for judging a bank's digital capabilities are no longer how many entry points it has opened, but how many customers the main channel retains and how deep the customers' trust is. Over the past two years, the number of daily uses per device and the effective usage time of mobile banking apps have not increased but have declined. Many mobile banking apps have piled up more and more functions, while users have to search through a screen full of marketing entry points to find basic functions such as transfers and balance inquiries. If integration merely consolidates scattered functions into a complex "super-large app," the subtraction in quantity is done, but the improvement in quality is hard to gain user recognition. Channel integration is an inevitable trend, but the factors that enhance user experience must also be given sufficient attention. Banks should restructure their service processes around customer usage habits, treat compliance requirements as a prerequisite for product development, and ensure that the remaining user entry points are truly convenient, user-friendly, and secure. Currently, large language models and intelligent agent technologies are reshaping the form of banking services. The "thinning and integration" of online channels is by no means the end of the digitalization process, but a new starting point for commercial banks' transition toward high-quality development.