China's banking regulators strengthened their grip on wealth management products (WMPs) being sold by local banks Wednesday, a development which some fear will cut into earnings at local commercial lenders.

Actually, these restrictions will do little to shrink banks' profits in the near future, given that most of the country's biggest lending institutions still realize most of their profits from the interest rate spread.

Despite efforts to liberalize interest rates, Chinese financial authorities are still firmly in control of fluctuations between deposit and loan rates, leaving banks with enough space to profit from the difference between the two. Indeed, this difference accounted for more than 75 percent of large banks' annual profits in 2012, according to their annual earnings reports.

What's more, these same reports also show that profits from WMP sales grew more slowly last year than profits from the interest rate gap.

As such, the financial impact of any crackdown on WMP sales right now is likely to be minimal.

The author is Yi Xianrong, a researcher from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.