On June 16, digital renminbi cross-border services ushered in the latest 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, injecting new vitality into global trade and financial cooperation.
Relying on the “CBETS” cross-border settlement comprehensive service platform (CBETS), digital RMB is creating a new safer, more efficient and more convenient cross-border payment experience, helping facilitate cross-border trade and high-level financial opening up.
In recent years, the global traditional cross-border payment system has generally suffered from low efficiency, high costs, limited coverage and other shortcomings, which restricts the efficient flow of international monetary funds.
As emerging technologies accelerate their application in cross-border payments, legal digital currencies provide new ideas for industry transformation and upgrading and break 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. Overseas participants can access through the Hong Kong access point at one point, and conveniently open multiple businesses. The digital RMB cross-border infrastructure service capabilities have reached a new level.
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.
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; not only state-owned major banks such as Industry, Agriculture, China, Construction, and Communications are actively deploying, but also joint-stock commercial banks such as Industrial Bank, CITIC, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank have 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.
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.
“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.
