DBS planning tightened lending to China SOEs

Shanghai

SOME banks are adopting stricter lending criteria for China's state-owned enterprises (SOEs), demanding collateral from some companies they used to deem as safe as government debt, as Beijing tries to reform its bloated firms and the economy slows.

Singapore's DBS Group, which recently suffered a loss on a bad loan to an SOE-related firm it had assessed as risk free, plans to launch a "decision grid" to assess the creditworthiness of SOEs, according to draft internal risk guidelines reviewed by Reuters.