In 2026, significant changes are taking place in the field of cross-border settlement.
In three years, the number of direct participants in CIPS (RMB Cross-border Payment System) has increased from less than 100 to 194, covering 191 countries and regions around the world.
At the same time, the cross-border settlement volume of those small and medium-sized banks and joint-stock banks that previously had to rely on the agency channels of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of China, and China Construction Bank is growing at an alarming rate.
From the data point of view, in early April 2026, the single-day transaction volume of CIPS has exceeded 1.22 trillion yuan, and the average daily transaction size in March increased by nearly 48% month-on-month.
In the past, global cross-border settlement was like a walled building – the three major banks held the only key (RMB clearing bank license and global correspondent bank network), and other banks had to pay to participate.
Today, this wall is being torn down by three forces simultaneously.
For small and medium-sized banks, this is an “infrastructure equality”.
The liberalization of CIPS direct participation qualifications has given city commercial banks a “direct ticket”, eliminating the need to detour through the three major banks.
Taking Qingdao Bank as an example, after direct participation, it has achieved “point-to-point” direct cross-border RMB settlement in seconds. In 2025, the cross-border RMB settlement volume will exceed 66 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 60.46%.
The compound growth rate of Suzhou Bank’s cross-border RMB settlement volume in the past three years has reached an astonishing 102%.
Bohai Bank, the only legal person bank with direct CIPS participation in Tianjin, only serves the Tianjin area and has achieved a cross-border settlement volume of 26 billion yuan, covering nearly 40% of the top 100 local import and export companies.
There is a clear logic behind these data: when the cost of access infrastructure approaches zero, the advantages of scale no longer belong only to the three giants.
From the perspective of joint-stock banks, this is a dimensionality reduction attack where “technology determines efficiency”.
Joint-stock banks such as Industrial Bank and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank did not choose to rely on physical branches, but used digitalization to reconstruct the entire service process.
Industrial Bank has organized 17 branches in export-oriented economically developed regions into the “First Array”. In 2025, the revenue of overseas branches surged by 46.4%, and corporate foreign currency deposits increased by 70.27% year-on-year, ranking first among joint-stock banks.
Shanghai Pudong Development Bank has built a three-line linkage pattern of “Shanghai-Hong Kong, Shanghai-New, and Shanghai-London”. The scale of cross-border settlement will reach 4.49 trillion yuan in 2025, a year-on-year increase of 44%.
What they have in common is that they use technological means to greatly improve the efficiency of approval and settlement of single business. For example, China Guangfa Bank has compressed the processing time of import bill bill business from 3 to 5 working days to less than 24 hours.
While big banks are still making “slow money” by relying on layers of approvals, joint-stock banks are already making “quick money.”
But what really changes the underlying logic is the third variable – the multilateral central bank digital currency bridge (mBridge).
The existence of mBridge means that cross-border settlement no longer has to go through SWIFT or the correspondent bank network, but is completed directly “point-to-point” through the central bank’s digital currency.
As of the end of November 2025, mBridge had processed a total of 4,047 cross-border payments, equivalent to RMB 387.2 billion.
What’s more important is the difference in efficiency: the traditional agency banking model takes several days, but mBridge increases the speed of cross-border settlement by 90% and reduces the cost by more than 50%.
On the first day of Macau’s launch, 11 banks completed 23 cross-border transactions, amounting to nearly 1.3 billion patacas.
This platform directly levels the starting line for all banks – on the distributed ledger, small banks and large banks have the same technical capabilities and clearing speeds, and the physical network advantages accumulated by the three major banks over the years are fundamentally broken.
The three forces are superimposed, and there is only one outcome: the loosening of monopoly is not a short-term fluctuation, but an irreversible structural change.
Judging from the current competitive landscape, the three major banks are not passively beaten. They are also deeply involved in the mBridge project and are simultaneously promoting digital transformation.
But the cake is no longer exclusive to them.
According to authoritative estimates, the actual penetration rate of RMB in international trade settlement has steadily exceeded 20%. In this rapidly expanding market, small and medium-sized banks and joint-stock banks are taking more and more business shares that originally belonged to the three major banks with their more flexible mechanisms and more efficient digital services.
For corporate customers, this means lower settlement costs, faster payment and more choices.
For the banking system, a cross-border settlement ecosystem in which “a hundred flowers bloom” rather than a “three pillars” is becoming a reality.
