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 an important step for digital renminbi in the field of cross-border services.
In recent years, the global traditional cross-border payment system has exposed many shortcomings, such as low efficiency, high cost, limited coverage, etc., which 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, the Governor of the People’s Bank of China announced the establishment of a digital RMB 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 ‘Shubida’ cross-border settlement comprehensive service platform (CBETS).
Overseas participants can access it through the Hong Kong access point and open multiple businesses conveniently, taking the digital renminbi cross-border infrastructure service capabilities to a new level.
Taking actual business as an example, in April this year, China Southern Power Grid relied on the ‘Shucoinda’ platform to successfully collect cross-border electricity sales in Laos in digital renminbi.
This business adopts a cross-border bilateral model, eliminating the need for intermediary agent banks and significantly compressing the settlement cycle from the traditional 3 working days to less than 5 hours.
Deputy Director of the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China introduced that 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, including 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; both state-owned banks are actively deploying, and joint-stock commercial banks are also attracted to participate.
The cooperation of multiple entities is accelerating the transformation of the platform’s technological advantages and service value 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.
With the help of a unified digital renminbi cross-border transfer gateway, ‘CBETS supports domestic and foreign participants and monetary authorities to access it at one point, eliminating the duplication of construction costs caused by multi-party docking.
At the same time, the ‘Shubida’ platform is still working hard to solve the problems of information fragmentation and insufficient transparency in traditional cross-border payments.
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 full process information traceability.
In addition, relying on the smart contract function, the ‘Shubida’ platform launches smart enterprise order payment business.
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, making cross-border trade settlement more intelligent and worry-free.
