On April 7, news came from the Loop Shenzhen Park that the “Kexintong” pilot business was officially launched in the park recently. This initiative provided a new path for the cross-border flow of salary for the first batch of scientific researchers, and successfully opened up a new cross-border payment scenario based on the “Multilateral Central Bank Digital Currency Bridge”.
The Loop project team of the Shenzhen Research Institute of the University of Hong Kong and Miaozhi Technology, a Shenzhen branch company of the Hong Kong Science Park, became the first batch of pilot targets.
Its three scientific researchers have realized the facilitated cross-border flow of scientific research salaries between Shenzhen and Hong Kong through this business.
In addition, two scientific researchers remitted their monthly salary from Hong Kong through the “Multilateral Central Bank Digital Currency Bridge” and successfully opened up a new cross-border payment scenario between Shenzhen and Hong Kong. This marked the first application of this national cross-border payment pilot project in a salary payment scenario.
The “Kexintong” pilot business is a specialized financial service and supervision plan jointly launched by the Loop Development Agency and Bank of China Shenzhen Loop Huanggang Branch under the guidance of the Shenzhen Branch of the People’s Bank of China and the Shenzhen Branch of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange in response to the new needs emerging in the cooperation zone.
This plan aims to solve the problem of cross-border salary payment for “dual-employment status” scientific researchers arising from the increasingly close scientific research cooperation between Shenzhen and Hong Kong.
This pilot business provides three major conveniences for foreign-related employees of core scientific research units.
First, scientific researchers can entrust domestic employers to report to banks uniformly, eliminating the tedious process of submitting materials in person and saving a lot of time and energy.
Second, it allows online processing of salary foreign exchange settlement and sales and cross-border remittances that do not account for the facilitation quota, eliminating the need to repeatedly submit documents, which greatly improves the efficiency of business processing.
Third, it is innovatively compatible with the “Multilateral Central Bank Digital Currency Bridge”, which greatly improves the efficiency of cross-border payments and makes the cross-border payment of salaries faster and safer.
This pilot is the latest achievement of financial openness and innovation in the Hetao Cooperation Zone.
As early as September 2023, the Shenzhen Branch of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange issued the “Operation Guidelines for the “Kehuitong” Pilot Business of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Cooperation Zone in the Loop” to open up a path for cross-border allocation of scientific research funds. The pilot has been successfully promoted nationwide in September 2025.
The launch of “Science and Technology Salary” is a deepening and supplement to the “Science and Technology Huitong” system, and accurately focuses on the cross-border mobility needs of individual scientific researchers.
An industry analyst said that the “Kexintong” pilot not only facilitates the exchange and cooperation of scientific research talents between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, but also reduces institutional transaction costs. Its combination with the “Digital Currency Bridge” is an important expansion of the application scenarios of the national digital financial infrastructure and has accumulated valuable experience for deepening the interconnection of the financial markets in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area in the future.
With the continuous advancement and improvement of the “Science and Technology Connect” pilot, I believe that more scientific researchers will benefit from it, and it will also inject new vitality into Shenzhen-Hong Kong scientific research cooperation.
