Commonwealth Bank has made the most headway of the major banks in culling wealth management and insurance activities from its operations, but CEO Matthew Comyn is still sweating over announced deals that are yet to get over the line.A big headache for the CBA boss is the tortuous approval process in China where the bank has been trying to offload its 37.5 per cent stake in a life insurance joint venture with the Bank of Communications.CBA announced that it was selling the investment in May last year but the bank is still waiting to get the final nod from Chinese regulators. The sale, which is expected to shore up the group's CET tier one capital by almost A$668 million, is critical for many reasons - not the least of which is the growing expectation of institutional investors for the bank to return capital to shareholders.In a report published last week Goldman Sachs' analyst Andrew Lyons told clients he believed the bank was likely to declare a special dividend of $1 at the 2019 full year profit announcement on Wednesday.Lyons expects the special dividend to be funded through the proceeds of the recently settled sale of the global asset management arm to MUFG.The likelihood for further capital returns at the 2020 interim result and beyond, mostly hangs on Chinese regulators approving the BoComm Life deal.That's because settlement of the transaction is a pre-condition for completing a separate transaction - the $2.5 billion sale of the CommInsure life business to AIA. Apart from supporting more special returns to shareholders, this big capital release also positions CBA to meet additional regulatory capital requirements likely to emerge over the next three years in New Zealand and Australia.At the moment, CBA's investments in BoComm Life and other Asian businesses are not counted in CBA's tier one capital because equity in foreign subsidiaries and associates is excluded from the APRA measure.For this reason, institutional investors will be acutely attuned to Comyn's commentary on Wednesday as to whether the insurance transactions are likely to settle any time soon.Chinese regulators have not given a public explanation for why it has taken so long to wave through the BoComm Life sale.The delay could be linked to action taken against BoComm Life in 2017 by the China Insurance Regulatory Commission.In November of that year the company was ordered by the CIRC not to sell new life products for six months after an investigation found that its policies were "problematic".The CIRC directed BoComm Life to restructure its life products before it re-entered the Chinese insurance market.The relationship between BoComm Life and its regulators appear to have been strained for some time - echoing CBA's tribulations in Australia.Resolution of the apparent stand-off with Chinese regulators is important for CBA given that it has other financial services assets in China it might want to sell.CBA holds an 18 per cent stake in a Shanghai-listed mid-tier bank known as the Bank of Hangzhou (BoH).In October a restriction on CBA divesting the strategic stake in