Based on the unbalanced panel data of 28 listed banks from 2009 to 2018, fixed effect model and mediating effect model were constructed to empirically study the interaction between the top management team characteristics, bank innovation and bank performance. The research results show that bank innovation plays an incompletely mediating effect between the executive age, executive tenure and bank performance, and the proportion of mediating effects are 27.21% and 55.32%, respectively. The mediating effect of the bank's innovation ability on executive education, executive gender and bank performance is not significant. According to the nature of property, grouping studies have found that there is a difference between the mediating effects of state-owned banks and non-state-owned banks' innovation capabilities.