HONG KONG — China’s new leadership is preparing to introduce bank deposit insurance as the first step in financial reforms to be started soon at a top-level meeting in Beijing, a government official and banking policy advisers said.

A consensus has formed among China’s leaders that the country needs a formal system of bank deposit insurance as banks have rapidly ramped up lending and begun offering a wide variety of increasingly risky investment products that do not appear on their balance sheets, the official and advisers said.