Frank Newman talks to China Daily.

SDB spearheaded the public offerings of Chinese lenders in 1988. It has been in the limelight in the past few months because of an earlier announcement of a tie-up with Ping An Insurance Group, from which the bank expects to receive up to 10.7 billion yuan ($1.57 billion) through issuing new shares to Ping An in a private placement and boost its capital adequacy ratio to above 10 percent from 8.62 percent at the end of June.

In the face of concerns over whether the deal with Ping An would finally get regulator's approval, Newman said he saw no major blocks for the deal at the present stage. The bank's previous potential deals with GE and major domestic steel maker Baosteel failed mainly because of the regulators' opposition.

Ping An Insurance Group, which now owns another banking subsidiary itself, has to fix the integration of Ping An bank and SDB in the next three years because regulators do not allow two banks to run parallel with each other within one financial institution.

"One possible solution could be SDB and Ping An Bank merged some time later within the three years," the chairman said, adding there were other options to proceed with the integration that might also be subject to regulators' instructions.