The COVID-19 epidemic has accelerated the digital economy’s pervasiveness throughout the Chinese economy, leading to a sharp rise in demand for “contactless” services in the financial industry. We examine the digital transformation of the Chinese banking industry using the DEA–Malmquist index method, supplemented by a distance function and time to compare the dynamic changes of productivity. Our paper then conducts an empirical study on the digital transformation of Chinese commercial banks based on their improvements in efficiency. We analyze banks with superior efficiency in science and technology investment and evaluate their digital maturity and digital transformation experience. Results show that digitalization investment has contributed to substantial production efficiency improvement for commercial banks; however, heterogeneity exists across banks. We further advocate a path for banks’ digital transformation based on theoretical research and empirical digital transformation experience in this area.

Based on the background of the digital transformation of commercial banks, the advantages and benefits of this study are to study the promotion effect of digital finance on the production efficiency of commercial banks from four aspects: technological innovation, financial innovation, deep integration of technology and finance, and industry advantages. This study verifies that digital finance has a positive impact on the total factor productivity of commercial banks. In order to study the impact of the development of digital finance on the efficiency of commercial banks, this paper puts forward two assumptions. Using the “text mining method” and taking the total factor productivity of commercial banks as the explanatory variable and the digital finance index as the core explanatory variable, this paper empirically studies the impact of digital finance on bank efficiency. Through empirical research, it is believed that through the analysis of total factor productivity, digital finance has strongly promoted the improvement of the total factor productivity of commercial banks through the technology spillover effect. The impact of digital finance on banks is therefore heterogeneous.

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