Abstract: Actively cultivating a distinctive Chinese financial culture holds significant guiding implications for promoting high-quality financial development and building a financial powerhouse. This paper conducts an empirical analysis by using the data from Chinese commercial banks from 2013 to 2022, combined with manually collected bank culture data, to examine the impact of commercial bank culture on bank risks and its underlying mechanisms. The findings reveal that bank culture can suppress bank risks. The mechanism tests indicate that bank culture can mitigate banking risks by enhancing the standardization of credit operations and optimizing internal governance. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that compliance, accountability, and collaborative cultures play a role in reducing banking risks. Compared to nationwide commercial banks, systemically important banks, and banks with higher liquidity creation, the intensity of banking culture exerts a more pronounced risk-reducing effect on local commercial banks, non-systemically important banks, and banks with lower liquidity creation capabilities. Therefore, the government should guide banks to strengthen their cultural construction, embedding cultural concepts throughout the entire process of bank operations and management. By leveraging policy guidance and cross-sector collaboration, it should enhance cultural cultivation in key institutions such as small and medium-sized banks. Furthermore, it should promote the synergistic efforts of cultural construction and formal regulatory systems, harnessing cultural soft power to drive the high-quality development in the banking industry.

Key words: financial culture, banking culture, cultural construction, bank risk, financial powerhouse