Personal Working Capital Share Breaks Through 40%
With active trading in Taiwan stocks, the phenomenon of four loans at once, where investors simultaneously tap mortgages, auto loans, unsecured loans and stock-pledged borrowing to speculate in stocks, has drawn attention. According to the financial statistics monthly report released by the Central Bank on October 29, personal working capital accounted for 40.66% of personal lending in September this year, a new high since November 2024. From 2018 to 2025, the ratio mostly ranged between 34% and 39%, showing this September's break above 40% was markedly higher than before. By the Central Bank's definition, personal working capital includes buying financial products such as stocks and bonds, paying salaries, purchasing raw materials, or SME owners borrowing in their personal names for corporate working capital, making it a key indicator for watching individuals borrowing from banks for investment and wealth management.
Judging from new lending, personal working capital has increased by 1.16 trillion yuan since the end of last year, while total personal lending increased by only 159 million yuan; converted, about 73.22% of new personal lending this year was for working capital purposes. The share was 64.34% in 2025, 48.10% in 2024, and ranged between 35% and 43% from 2019 to 2023, showing the share of working capital in new personal lending has jumped sharply this year, reflecting more active personal fund allocation for investment and other uses.
Not Many Cases? Industry Players Describe It as a Black Hole
However, some financial industry players said after internal checks that clients meeting the four-loans-at-once profile are not many. Mega Financial Holding Chairman Dong Ruibin said in a July interview that Mega Bank had 4 clients with all leverage fully drawn under four loans at once, up by 3 households from a year earlier, with an increase of about 200 million yuan. CTBC Financial Holding President Gao Lixue said at the second-quarter earnings call that CTBC Bank had about 50 clients meeting the four-loans-at-once definition, with combined exposure of about 700 million yuan. In practice, clients passing banks' 5P credit principles and other reviews can indeed simultaneously take out mortgages including additional borrowing, auto loans, unsecured loans and stock-secured loans, but if they further obtain pledged financing from securities firms, banks have no way to grasp the overall leverage.
Securities industry players told this newspaper that no very serious situation is visible for now, judging from margin financing and unlimited-purpose loan balances on the securities side, which they believe have not deviated from the overall stock market trend. Another unnamed brokerage described the current four loans at once as like a black hole, seemingly dangerous, yet no one knows the actual situation clearly. Unless they are high-risk clients involving anti-money-laundering concerns, even banks and securities subsidiaries under the same financial holding company cannot share client credit data with each other, making it even harder to identify highly leveraged groups.
Cross-Industry Checks Go Live on the 31st, Allowing Two-Way Queries
The cross-industry interface system for exchanging credit business credit data, built by the Joint Credit Information Center and the Taiwan Stock Exchange, will go live on October 31, when banks and brokers can check each other's client credit conditions, seen as key to clarifying the actual four-loans-at-once situation. According to the Financial Supervisory Commission's explanation on the 29th, after launch banks can query 4 categories of data on the brokerage side: margin financing and securities lending, securities business loans, unlimited-purpose loans, and securities lending; brokers can query 4 categories of credit data on the bank side: real estate, movable property, corporate investment and working capital.
Banking Bureau Deputy Director-General Wang Yun-chung responded at a regular press conference in early October that this cross-industry credit information exchange mechanism is meant to let banks and brokers keep abreast of borrowing clients' risk tolerance, and should not be understood as a control mechanism targeting four loans at once. Brokerages estimate the Financial Supervisory Commission can grasp the actual four-loans-at-once situation through this mechanism before further judging its severity, stressing that claims by industry players that they have grasped credit on both ends with few cases and controllable risks are merely speculative whitewashing.