On June 16, digital renminbi cross-border services ushered in the latest remarkable progress: the first batch of 26 financial institutions signed up to access the digital renminbi international operation center.
This move marks a solid step forward for the application of digital renminbi in the cross-border field.
In recent years, the global traditional cross-border payment system has exposed many shortcomings, such as low efficiency, high cost, limited coverage, etc. These problems have seriously restricted the efficient flow of international monetary funds.
With the accelerated application of emerging technologies in the field of cross-border payments, legal digital currencies have provided new ideas for industry transformation and upgrading and breaking development bottlenecks.
In June 2025, Pan Gongsheng, Governor of the People’s Bank of China, announced the establishment of a digital renminbi international operation center in Shanghai to serve the construction of cross-border and offshore systems.
In September of the same year, the center was officially put into operation and launched three major business platforms: cross-border digital payment, blockchain services, and digital assets.
Since this year, the Digital RMB International Operation Center has further integrated and upgraded functions, iteratively upgrading the original three platforms into the “Digital RMB” cross-border settlement comprehensive service platform.
Overseas participants can access multiple services through the Hong Kong access point at one point, which brings the digital renminbi cross-border infrastructure service capabilities to a new level.
Looking at actual cases, in April this year, China Southern Power Grid relied on the “Doucoinda” platform to successfully collect cross-border electricity sales in Laos in digital RMB.
This business adopts a cross-border bilateral model, which eliminates the need for intermediary agent banks and significantly compresses the settlement cycle from the traditional 3 working days to less than 5 hours. It truly realizes one-click payment and funds can be transferred across two places instantly.
Lu Yuan, deputy director of the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China, said that the “CBETS” platform (CBETS) not only supports cross-border interconnection with the payment systems and legal digital currency systems of various monetary authorities, but also supports direct access by financial institutions.
The first batch of 26 participants who have signed up for access are diverse in type and cover a wide range of areas. They include Standard Chartered China and other foreign-funded corporate banks in China, as well as overseas branches of many Chinese banks in Thailand, Singapore, Laos, Qatar and other places. There are state-owned banks such as Industry, Agriculture, Industry, China Construction, and Communications, which are actively deploying, and joint-stock commercial banks such as Industrial Bank, CITIC, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank have also participated.
Multiple parties are working together to promote the technological advantages and service value of the platform, accelerating its transformation into a strong driving force that empowers the real economy.
Under the traditional model, a cross-border fund often has to move through 3 to 5 intermediary banks and go through tedious processes such as message verification and compliance review.
“CBETS uses a unified digital renminbi cross-border transfer gateway to support one-point access for domestic and foreign participants and monetary authorities, eliminating the duplication of construction costs caused by multi-party docking.” said Gao Feng, senior manager of the Operations and Channel Management Department of the Bank of Communications.
At the same time, through cross-chain collaboration with the scenario application platform, the digital renminbi is promoting the integration of trade document flow, financial information flow, and capital flow, taking advantage of the non-tamperable and information transparent characteristics of the blockchain to significantly enhance regulatory penetration.
Traditional cross-border payments have shortcomings such as information fragmentation and insufficient transparency. The “Shubida” platform is working hard to solve these problems.
Take cross-border e-commerce payment collection as an example. Under the traditional model, funds flow online, but invoices, business vouchers and other data still rely on offline transmission, and information flow and capital flow are disconnected from each other.
The “Shubida” platform launches cross-border e-commerce payment collection services, opening up two types of information transmission, achieving deep integration of cross-border transaction information and capital information, and achieving traceability of the entire process.
Wang Zhimin, deputy president of the Zhejiang Branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, said that through the “Shubida” platform, Yiwu merchants have achieved rapid repayment of cross-border e-commerce trade payments from Lao customers.
The “Shubida” platform provides payment institutions with a new, more efficient and more visual settlement path, assisting the digital transformation of cross-border trade.
In addition, “relying on the smart contract function, both parties to the transaction can agree on good conditions and realize automatic payment in complex scenarios, making cross-border trade settlement more intelligent and worry-free.” said a staff member of the Digital RMB Operation Management Center.
In response to actual needs in cross-border trade, the “Shubida” platform launched an intelligent enterprise order payment service.
Trading companies can transmit standardized trade order information through commercial banks to facilitate online confirmation by both trading companies and automatically trigger the payment process, effectively solving the problems of cumbersome multi-party docking between banks and enterprises and high interoperability costs.
