He played a key role in negotiating financial aid from the United States in 1937-1940, working with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau.

His guiding principle was “service to society, support for industry, and prosperity to enhance international trade” and he made sure that his staff must be very polite and patient with their clients, small depositors.

The Shanghai Commercial and Savings Bank's motto, very reflective of Chen's values, was "service to society, support for industry, and development of international trade."

In 1931 he created a special trust department in the bank initially to rent out safety deposit boxes but later on including insurance and real estate operations among other things.

Having made the necessary preparations he submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Communications under the Northern Warlords Government (1912–1927), asking for permission to establish a travel service department and to sell train tickets on a commission basis.

Whilst the proposal was vociferously opposed by the many foreigners occupying important positions in many Chinese railways build with foreign loans at the National Railway Through Transport Conference, it was finally adopted thanks to the support of General Director of Communications Ye Gongche and others, and on August 1, 1923, the Travel Service Department of the Shanghai Commercial, the first of its kind run by Chinese compatriots, was born in the Banks Building on Ningpo road.

It operated on a trial basis and opened only to those from "polite society" instead of to the wider populace, providing a comparatively limited business scope.

It declared bankruptcy in Taipei in July 1954 and retreated from the arena, but its epoch-making contribution to the Chinese Tourism Industry is still dwelt upon with great relish.

The core business of CTS (holdings) includes travel, industry invests (steel and iron), the related real estate development and distribution trade.

Three years later Liu Hongsheng mortgaged his new eight-story group office building to K. P. Chen to raise the capital for launching The China Development Bank.

Some agreements were made: K. P. Chen led a Chinese delegation to Washington in 1936, seeking to persuade the United States to modify its silver purchasing policy.

[3]: 47 In 1938 when the Chinese Ambassador Wellington Koo called on U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau to seek financial aid, the U. S. Secretary told him it might be advisable for the Chinese Government to send K. P. Chen (whom Morgenthau had negotiated with in the past) to America to enquire after credit for the purchase of flour and grain goods.

Kung, through K. P. Chen, endeavored to obtain assistance from the American Commercial Credit for the purchase of four airplanes, badly needed by the China National Aviation Corporation.

In April 1940, K. P. Chen again traveled to the United States, this time to facilitate a loan based on tin exports from Yunnan.

When he sought to borrow money from Washington in 1938, democracy was not considered good security but tung oil, essential in high-grade paints and varnishes, was.

To make this work he founded Universal Trading Corp. in Manhattan to manage tung-oil sales, budgeting one-half of the proceeds to repay the debt.

Kung, his wife Soong Ai-ling and her sister, Madame Sun Yat-sen were caught in Hong Kong when war erupted in Asia.

Amid a torrential downpour of bombs and artillery shells, K. P. Chen, Kung, and Madame Sun, were hustled into a plane, flown over the Japanese lines and set safely down, 200 miles inland.

On April 17, 1947 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, President of the National Government of the Republic of China nominated K. P. Chen to membership of the then new state council.

He approved an annual budget of 12,000 tael in silver and invited a former manager of the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank to lecture his staff on the theory and practice of foreign exchange market.

On Monday, March 18, 1940, Time magazine described him thus: "Middle-aged Banker Chen (University of Pennsylvania '09) looks so much like a Westerner's idea of a Chinese banker that wily and subtle-minded Americans have difficulty in believing he is as simple and direct as he is... bespectacled, careful, shy of the press, close-mouthed (in the Calvin Coolidge rather than Sumner Welles sense), he has no hobbies, makes no picturesque Oriental remarks, works 24 hours a day at the unglamorous business of cementing U.S.-Chinese trade relations, and considers Chinese repayment of U. S. loans his personal responsibility.