This study investigates the impact of banking market deregulation on firm innovation, focusing on foreign bank entry. Exploiting the staggered deregulation of China’s banking sector to foreign banks following its accession to the World Trade Organization, we find a significant positive relationship between foreign bank entry and firm innovation. We further show that foreign bank entry could promote firm innovation directly by providing more and higher-quality banking services to customers, and indirectly by inducing domestic banks to extend more credit to firms with more soft information, enhancing their capacity to support innovative firms, and generating technology spillovers through an increased presence of foreign-invested firms.