On June 16, digital renminbi cross-border services ushered in the latest and eye-catching progress: the first batch of 26 financial institutions successfully signed up to access the digital renminbi international operation center.
This move marks a solid step forward 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, and limited coverage, 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, Pan Gongsheng, Governor of the People’s Bank of China, announced the establishment of a Digital RMB International Operation Center in Shanghai, dedicated to serving 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 “CBETS” cross-border settlement comprehensive service platform (CBETS).
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.
With one-click payment, funds can be transferred across two places instantly.
In April this year, China Southern Power Grid relied on the “Shubida” platform to successfully collect payments for 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.
Lu Yuan, deputy director of the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People’s Bank of China, said 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. 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 platform’s technological advantages and service value, 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.
And “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. According to reports, through cross-chain collaboration with scenario application platforms, digital renminbi is promoting the integration of trade document flow, financial information flow, and capital flow, using the blockchain to
The characteristics of tamper-proof and transparent information significantly improve the penetration of supervision.
Traditional cross-border payments have shortcomings such as information fragmentation and insufficient transparency.
Taking cross-border e-commerce payment collection as an example, under the traditional model, funds flow online, but invoices, business vouchers and other information still rely on offline transmission, and information is not available.
Interest flow and capital flow are disconnected from each other.
The “Shubida” platform has launched cross-border e-commerce payment services, opening up the two types of information transmission, realizing the deep integration of cross-border transaction information and capital information, and realizing the traceability of the entire process of information.
Wang Zhimin, vice president of the Zhejiang Branch of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, said that through the “Shubida” platform, Yiwu merchants have realized cross-border e-commerce for Lao customers.
Quick repayment of trade payments.
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 can agree on conditions and realize automatic payment in complex scenarios, making cross-border trade settlement more intelligent and worry-free.”
“Introduced by the staff of the Digital RMB Operation and Management Center. In response to the actual needs in cross-border trade, the “Shubida” platform has launched an intelligent enterprise order payment service. Trading enterprises can transmit standardized trade order information through commercial banks, facilitate online confirmation by enterprises on both sides of the trade, automatically trigger the payment process, and effectively solve the problems of cumbersome multi-party docking between banks and enterprises and high interoperability costs.
