(Source: "Financial Times" February 9, 2026, Page 8: Theoretical Research)
Zhu Jigao Xiang Zhongxiu
The Central Financial Work Conference systematically elaborated on the development path of finance with Chinese characteristics, emphasizing "strengthening high-level financial opening up" and clearly requiring "steady expansion of institutional opening up in the financial sector", improving cross-border investment and financing facilitation, and enhancing the competitiveness and influence of Shanghai International Financial Center to better serve the real economy. At the Lujiazui Forum in June 2025, heads of central financial management departments such as the People's Bank of China, the State Financial Supervision and Administration Commission, and the China Securities Regulatory Commission spoke out and released an important signal to further expand financial openness. The opening up of China's banking industry is going through a "channel-type opening" that expands market access, and is moving towards a new stage of "institutional opening" that fully integrates rules, regulations, management, standards and international high standards. This fundamental change is not only an intrinsic requirement for building a modern financial system with Chinese characteristics and solidifying the foundation of a financial power, but also a strategic support for the banking industry to empower Chinese enterprises to deeply participate in the reconstruction of the global industrial chain, maintain and develop the new pattern of globalization.
Deepening institutional opening:Building a new high-level financial open system
Institutional openness is the core essence of high-level financial openness. Its goal is to promote the connection between domestic financial regulatory frameworks, market rules and international best practices, and create a stable, transparent, and predictable business environment. The focus of China's financial opening has shifted from building physical "access channels" to laying systematic "operating tracks." The results of the institutional opening up of the banking industry are directly reflected in the improvement of the service level of China's banking industry and the enhancement of international competitiveness.
(1) Institutional innovation is directly transformed into the business advantages and service capabilities of Chinese-funded banks.The functional upgrade of the Shanghai Free w88 Zone’s free w88 account system on December 5, 2025 is regarded as the latest measure for China’s high-level financial opening up. Major Chinese commercial banks such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank are not only the core builders and main service providers of this system, but also directly empower enterprises with the benefits of opening up through this platform. This upgrade of the free w88 account function allows pilot companies to handle more free cross-border receipts and payments based on instructions, aiming to enhance "global capital allocation capabilities", which is achieved by Chinese banks providing key financial services. This shows that institutional openness is being transformed into tangible cross-border financial convenience for enterprises through Chinese banks.
(2) The service network and comprehensive capabilities of Chinese-funded banks’ “going out” are a concentrated test of the effectiveness of institutional openness.Relying on a global network, Chinese banks can provide one-stop services such as listing financial consulting, cross-border structure design and fund settlement coordination for enterprises to connect with the international capital market. For leading companies with operations in many countries, we can help them achieve efficient collection and dispatch of global funds and significantly reduce financial costs by customizing multi-currency, cross-regional global cash management solutions. Actively support the high-quality development of the “Belt and Road” construction by continuously injecting financial vitality.
(3) The steady improvement of the international status of the RMB has injected core momentum into the open system.The RMB has firmly become the largest settlement currency for my country’s external balance of payments (see Figure 1), and ranks among the top three w88 financing currencies and payment currencies in the world. The weight of Chinese bonds in the world's three major bond indexes has also gradually increased. This series of developments has created unprecedented conditions for the banking industry to reduce exchange risks and provide local currency financing solutions in cross-border services.
The core of deeper opening up to the outside world is to promote the strategic transformation of Chinese banks from "scale expansion" to "connotative development" in a higher level of open competition through high-standard market rules and an international business environment shaped by institutional opening up, and comprehensively enhance their comprehensive capabilities in cross-border financial services, global resource allocation, and serving the country's opening-up strategy. Under the dual constraints of policy guidance and international rule benchmarking, Chinese banks need to transform external pressures from the international financial market and competition from foreign institutions into endogenous driving forces for improving corporate governance, improving risk management levels, and accelerating product and service innovation.
Facing the pressure of narrowing net interest margins brought about by changes in the global interest rate environment, Chinese banks need to optimize their business structures in an open environment and explore high-quality development paths. Actively developing capital-saving businesses such as wealth management, transaction banking, and investment banking has become an important direction to enhance international competitiveness. Leading banks have gradually formed differentiated professional advantages in the international market by strengthening cross-border asset allocation and improving global online service systems.
Strengthen cross-border service capabilities:Empowering Chinese enterprises to operate globally
Institutional openness provides a grand stage for the banking industry to empower enterprises to "go global", and the real test lies in transforming the openness dividends into efficient and convenient cross-border financial services that are perceivable to micro-enterprises. Supporting the globalization of Chinese enterprises requires the banking industry to upgrade from a traditional settlement and financing service provider to a "global comprehensive service partner" covering the entire cycle of investment and financing, risk management, and treasury management.
(1) Based on the internationalization of the RMB, build a cross-border financial service system covering the entire chain.The facilitation of cross-border use of RMB is a financial infrastructure that reduces enterprises’ exchange costs and avoids exchange rate risks. The banking industry is actively converting policy advantages into product advantages. A benchmark case is that in 2025, Bank of China Fujian Branch, as the lead bank, successfully formed a syndicated loan of 3.78 billion yuan for Zijin Mining's acquisition of the Akeem Gold Mine Project in Ghana, of which the bank itself invested 1.8 billion yuan. In the process of M&A financing, enterprises put forward the need to use RMB loans to reduce overall financing costs. Accordingly, Bank of China provides financial services related to forward foreign exchange purchases and assists enterprises in managing and hedging the exchange rate fluctuation risks faced in cross-border transactions by continuing to provide market-competitive forward quotations. In this process, the combination of RMB-denominated financing and exchange rate risk management tools has provided relatively stable local currency financial support for corporate cross-border mergers and acquisitions.
(2) Focus on the pain points of enterprises’ global operations and build financial infrastructure for global operations.Enterprises “going global” face a complex and ever-changing environment, and their success increasingly depends on whether they can obtain efficient, safe, and low-cost financial support in micro-level aspects such as investment, financing, and operations. By actively responding to this demand, China's banking industry can transform from a traditional cross-border financial service provider into an in-depth participant and enabler of enterprises' global value chains, and build a solid financial foundation for enterprises' global operations.
1. Settlement:Penetrate through complex scenarios to ensure that funds can be “recovered and paid smoothly”. In response to the "small currency" settlement problem that has arisen in the growing w88 exchanges between countries co-building the "Belt and Road", some banks have launched customized solutions to support cross-border currency collection and payment, allowing companies to complete exchange payments through U.S. dollar accounts, simplifying the process. At the same time, innovations in remittance tools also provide fully automated services for foreign w88 companies, enabling "instant deposits" and significantly speeding up capital turnover.
In terms of exchange rate risk management, the role of banks is gradually shifting from passive execution to more active risk management and service coordination. According to information released by the Jingzhou Branch of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, since 2025, the branch has teamed up with the Jingzhou Branch of the Agricultural Bank of China to carry out targeted analysis around the company's cross-border settlement structure in the process of serving a local chemical product manufacturer with the Southeast Asian market as its main export direction. On the basis of sorting out key links such as corporate payment currencies, collection cycles and settlement methods, we will guide companies to negotiate with overseas counterparties and gradually adjust the original settlement method to cross-border RMB settlement. With the systematic adjustment of settlement currencies, the company will achieve a cumulative cross-border collection and payment scale of approximately RMB 560 million in 2025, which has alleviated the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on its operational stability to a certain extent.
For more complex cross-border project contracting and overseas project operations, settlement services need to be embedded in the entire project cycle. By providing a package of documentary settlement and financing tools such as export letters of credit, letters of guarantee, and supply chain finance, the bank has formed a diversified risk mitigation system to ensure that project funds flow safely and timely as agreed in the contract, truly realizing "what you can invest, you can get back."
2. Fund collection:Promote the construction of the global treasury system with the support of banking services. For large enterprise groups with operations in multiple countries and regions, funds are dispersed in the accounts of overseas subsidiaries for a long time, which can easily lead to problems such as reduced fund use efficiency, increased financial costs, and insufficient management transparency. Building a global treasury system with the group as the core and achieving centralized management and unified dispatch of capital flows has become an important direction for multinational enterprises to improve their financial governance capabilities. In this process, commercial banks have provided important financial support for corporate treasury construction through account system design, cross-border fund management products, and bank-enterprise system docking.
In the process of promoting the construction of the treasury system, some central enterprises have achieved a systematic upgrade of the fund management model by integrating domestic and foreign bank accounts, unifying fund management rules, and carrying out system docking with multiple commercial banks. At the same time, more multinational companies choose to set up treasury management centers in international financial centers such as Hong Kong and Singapore, and cooperate with a number of Chinese or international commercial banks to build multi-currency and multi-level capital pool structures. The bank is mainly responsible for global account opening, cross-border fund collection, internal fund transfer, liquidity management and other functions, assisting enterprises to achieve centralized management and unified dispatch of funds in different currencies and different regions. This model has been applied in many central enterprises and large enterprise groups, and has become one of the important ways for enterprises to promote the construction of global treasury.
From a technical implementation perspective, the bank connects the corporate treasury system with the bank account system through "bank-enterprise direct connection" and other methods, allowing the group headquarters to grasp domestic and overseas account balances and capital flows in real time. On this basis, banks can also provide fund management functions such as automatic collection and regular scanning according to corporate needs to reduce fund accumulation and improve usage efficiency. Through the above service arrangements, enterprises can achieve centralized monitoring and overall allocation of group-level funds while maintaining the normal operation of overseas business entities, thereby enhancing the visibility, controllability and flexibility of global fund management.
3. Financing:Connect the global market and create a diversified overseas "capital warehouse". Supporting enterprises' overseas expansion requires not only the credit output of domestic banks, but also the need to help enterprises establish direct financing channels in the international capital market, optimize financing structures, and reduce overall costs. Chinese banks are required to actively play the dual roles of “guide” and “service provider”.
On the one hand, banks use their own credit and international networks to issue bonds in the international capital market, and use the raised funds specifically to support overseas projects, forming a virtuous cycle of "overseas financing, overseas use"; on the other hand, banks actively assist high-quality enterprises, especially private enterprises, to land in international financial centers such as Hong Kong, China, for equity or debt financing. The bank helps companies use international capital to develop overseas business by providing full-chain services such as listing consulting, issuance and underwriting, cross-border fund custody, and market value management.
4. The financial enterprise itself:Refining the core of internationalization and building a secure bottom line for a “financial power”. Faced with the narrowing of domestic net interest margins and the strong demand from "going global" companies, honing strong international operating capabilities has become a core proposition for Chinese banks to build a second growth curve and serve the construction of a financial power. This not only means that the overseas layout is shifting from scale expansion to intensive cultivation, but also requires banks to achieve a systematic leap in capabilities in terms of serving entities, preventing and controlling risks, and contributing to national strategies, so as to build an independent, safe, and efficient global financial service system.
In terms of corporate business, the overseas corporate services of Chinese banks have transcended traditional settlement and credit, and have been upgraded to comprehensive solution providers deeply embedded in corporate globalization strategies. By establishing a business system that covers the entire life cycle of enterprises "going global", it provides "one-stop" services from counseling to capital settlement for enterprises to go public, customizes multi-currency global cash management solutions, supports cross-border mergers and acquisitions and helps enterprises expand production capacity and technology upgrades overseas, and promotes China's manufacturing industry from product "exporting overseas" to industrial ecology "exporting overseas".
In terms of private business, with the expansion of overseas employees and high-net-worth customers of Chinese-funded enterprises, banks' retail financial services have also expanded across borders. Some banks have begun to provide personal cross-border settlement, salary management and other services for employees of "going global" companies. Some leading banks have clearly taken the globalization of wealth management as a strategic direction and are committed to relying on the advantages of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area to help customers allocate global assets to meet the diversified personal financial needs that arise as companies "go global."
In terms of anti-money laundering and compliance, we should respond to high-pressure global supervision and build a strong risk firewall. China's financial regulatory authorities are continuing to benchmark against international standards such as the Anti-Money Laundering Recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) and promote a profound transformation of anti-money laundering work from system compliance to risk prevention and control. The "Management Measures for Customer Due Diligence and Preservation of Customer Identity Information and Transaction Records of Financial Institutions" announced on October 31, 2025, embodies this core concept and clearly requires financial institutions to take measures that match the risks and eliminate "one size fits all" to balance security and convenience. This marks that supervision has put forward higher requirements for the risk control capabilities of Chinese banks’ overseas institutions, and promotes the establishment of an active, precise and intelligent global anti-money laundering management system. To this end, leading banks are working to integrate big data and artificial intelligence (AI) to build customer-centric comprehensive risk profiles and monitoring models, striving to identify and intervene in high-risk behaviors such as abnormal cross-border capital flows as soon as possible. The forging of this capability is not only to cope with international regulatory pressure, but also is the cornerstone for Chinese banks to practice a prudent business culture, maintain national financial security, and win long-term trust in overseas markets. It is an indispensable endogenous support for serving the construction of a financial power.
In terms of serving the construction of a financial power, supporting national strategies with professional capabilities. First, actively expand and lead independent and controllable financial infrastructure, which is the strategic cornerstone of safeguarding financial sovereignty and serving the internationalization of the RMB. For example, the RMB Cross-border Payment System (CIPS) is not only a technical channel, but also a key platform for China to promote institutional openness (see Figure 2). On December 19, 2025, the People's Bank of China officially issued the revised "Business Rules for the RMB Cross-border Payment System". Among them, measures such as relaxing the selection of fund custodian banks for overseas institutions have effectively lowered the threshold for international institutions to access CIPS, aiming to expand their global "circle of friends." The leading institution represented by the Bank of China is not only an important builder and participant of CIPS, but also plays the role of the main channel for RMB clearing on a global scale. As of August 2025, Bank of China has served as the RMB clearing bank in 16 countries and regions around the world. This combination of "hard connectivity" of infrastructure and "soft connectivity" of rules and standards has laid a safe and efficient infrastructure "highway" for Chinese banks to serve the globalization of enterprises.
The second is to empower the national industrial strategy with financial precision and transform the professional capabilities of banks into a booster for international competition in the industry. The role of Chinese banks has long gone beyond simple financing providers and is becoming a strategic partner in assisting China’s industrial upgrading and “ecological overseas expansion”. When serving the national seed industry revitalization strategy, Agricultural Bank of China provided innovative financial support throughout the entire project cycle in view of the tight schedule, high financing costs and exchange rate fluctuation risks faced by CITIC Group in taking the lead in acquiring high-quality Brazilian corn seed assets. In the cross-border bidding in 2017, Agricultural Bank of China pioneered the "domestic guarantee and domestic loan + domestic and overseas collaboration" model to quickly provide key financial guarantees; in subsequent operations, it not only saved the company's cumulative financing costs by more than 50 million yuan through handling foreign exchange locks, but also landed the first cross-border RMB seed industry loan in the Chinese banking industry in 2023. In 2025, Agricultural Bank of China will also cooperate with other banks to provide a syndicated loan of RMB 4 billion for the project and continue to optimize its debt structure. This series of tailor-made financial services has effectively protected the overseas layout of key industries and is a model for Chinese finance to help the seed industry "go global" and "stand firm".
The third is to more actively participate in and even shape international financial governance, transforming from a rule adaptor to a rule contributor. On the one hand, Chinese banks build cooperation platforms by hosting large-scale international financial activities. For example, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China appeared at the 2025 BRICS New Industrial Revolution Exhibition, actively guiding and deepening pragmatic cooperation in financial innovation under the framework of the "Greater BRICS Cooperation"; on the other hand, by leading international sovereign and multilateral institutions to issue "Panda Bonds" (RMB-denominated bonds) in China, Chinese banks have directly participated in the international pricing and rule-making of RMB assets. In transactions such as the issuance of panda bonds, Chinese banks usually play key roles as lead underwriters and bookkeepers. This not only promotes the two-way opening up of capital, but also substantially enhances the voice and influence of China's financial market in international rules.
Coordinate openness and security:Build a strong cross-border financial risk firewall
Financial opening up to the outside world is by no means a matter of letting things go, but it is necessary to firmly maintain the bottom line of safety in development. A higher level of openness is accompanied by more complex risk forms, which places unprecedented high-level requirements on the banking industry's risk prevention and control capabilities. Coordinating development and security is the lifeline for the banking industry’s steady and long-term opening-up.
(1) The primary challenge is to prevent the cross-border contagion of financial risks.The turmoil in the international financial market, the spillover effects of the monetary policies of major economies, geopolitical conflicts, etc. may all be transmitted to the country through capital flows, exchange rates, market sentiment and other channels. Therefore, the banking industry must establish a macro risk monitoring and early warning system with a global perspective. This requires banks to not only pay attention to traditional credit risks and market risks, but also to incorporate country risks and geopolitical risks into a normalized management framework. In cross-border M&A projects, Bank of China conducts in-depth research on the host country’s political and economic situation and exchange rate fluctuation patterns, which is a reflection of this micro-risk management and control. At the macro level, as the scale of domestic RMB financial assets held by foreign entities exceeds 10 trillion yuan, how to prevent the impact of large-scale abnormal capital flows on the domestic financial market is a long-term issue that the banking industry and regulatory authorities need to coordinate to deal with.
(2) The core task is to build a comprehensive risk management system that adapts to the open environment.The complex structure of transnational financial groups, the continuous innovation of cross-border financial products, and the cross-border application of financial technology have greatly increased the concealment and contagion of risks, and the risk of regulatory arbitrage has increased.
(3) Risk management needs to transform into global intelligent risk control.Banks need to form a team proficient in international practices to conduct penetrating due diligence and use derivatives hedging and other tools to isolate risks. The global risk control platform based on big data and artificial intelligence can integrate global data, build a risk view, realize real-time early warning and dynamic management of overseas assets, and complete the qualitative change from "post-event response" to "pre-event early warning".
(4) Defend financial data security and sovereignty.The financial industry is a data-intensive industry, and cross-border financial services involve a large amount of personal privacy information, corporate w88 secrets, and important data closely related to national economic security. While promoting cross-border data flow to meet global business collaboration needs, the banking industry must strictly abide by relevant laws and regulations such as the Cybersecurity Law of the People's Republic of China, the Data Security Law of the People's Republic of China, and the Personal Information Protection Law of the People's Republic of China. On the one hand, a sound data export security assessment and compliance review mechanism should be established and improved to ensure that cross-border data flow complies with legal and regulatory requirements; on the other hand, "data available and invisible" technical paths such as privacy computing, secure multi-party computing, data encryption and desensitization should be actively explored to achieve reasonable utilization of data value without directly transmitting original data to support cross-border anti-money laundering, credit risk management and other businesses. Continuing to promote the application of financial technology in the field of data security will help improve the data protection capabilities and system security levels of financial institutions, and reduce the risk of cyber attacks and data leaks.
Future Outlook:Building a banking system that matches a high level of openness
Looking forward to the “15th Five-Year Plan” and beyond, the opening up of China’s banking industry and the “going out” of service companies will present a pattern of deep collaboration and two-way promotion. The significance of building a modern banking system that matches a high level of openness goes far beyond the development of the industry itself. The opening and upgrading of China's banking industry is essentially an important foundation for building a new development pattern and promoting high-quality economic development. In the future, we need to continue to make efforts in the following directions.
(1) Continue to deepen institutional opening up and actively participate in international financial governance. The focus of future opening-up will shift from benchmarking existing rules to more proactive participation in and even leading the formulation of international rules. On June 19, 2025, a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce stated at a regular press conference that in order to align with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), China has completed in-depth domestic analysis and evaluation and bid preparations since its formal application to join in September 2021. At the same time, relevant rules have been piloted in conditional free w88 pilot zones and free w88 ports. In terms of the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), China formally applied to join in November 2021 and continues to advance negotiations. For example, from July 23 to 24, 2025, the China DEPA Working Group held its eighth chief negotiator meeting. Faced with this trend, it is necessary for China's banking industry to proactively study the business opportunities and challenges brought about by these high-standard rules and make arrangements in advance.
At the same time, China is integrating more actively into the global financial governance platform. For example, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) International Banking Operations Conference (Sibos) will be held in mainland China (Beijing) for the first time in October 2024. Through such platforms, China can contribute Chinese wisdom in emerging governance areas such as digital currency, green financial standards, and sustainable finance, thereby enhancing its voice in the international financial system.
(2) Focus on new productivity and create a new ecosystem of industrial finance. This requires the banking industry to transform from a passive provider of funds to an active industry collaborator and ecosystem builder, and to deeply embed cross-border financial services into the global chain of cutting-edge industries. Banks need to provide full life cycle financial solutions covering R&D, cross-border incubation, large-scale expansion and global operations for scientific and technological enterprises in the fields of integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, new energy vehicles and other fields; they must deeply cultivate key industrial clusters, build a digital and trustworthy cross-border supply chain financial system around core enterprises, and empower upstream and downstream enterprises. At the same time, we should also take the initiative to build a cross-border circulation bridge of "technology-industry-finance", link the global capital market, guide the precise allocation of international capital, and assist domestic industrial capital in the layout of global technology assets, thereby building the bank's own core competitive advantages while promoting industrial transition.
(3) Consolidate the two pillars of talent and technology to build a solid foundation for long-term development. Talent is an important foundation for banks’ international competitiveness. As the complexity and professionalism of cross-border business continue to increase, when banks serve enterprises to "go global" and participate in international financial cooperation, they not only need professionals who are familiar with international financial rules, overseas regulatory systems and cross-cultural communication environments, but also increasingly need a composite team with financial technology literacy. In the fields of cross-border payment and clearing, global cash management, cross-border M&A financing, and anti-money laundering and compliance management, you need to have a deep understanding of international rules and overseas market operating mechanisms, and you also need to be able to use information technology to systematically integrate complex business processes and manage risks. In line with this, the application of financial technology also needs to gradually shift from mainly serving internal management to supporting and optimizing cross-border financial infrastructure. By using technologies such as blockchain to improve the transparency and operational efficiency of cross-border payments and clearing, and using big data and artificial intelligence technologies to strengthen global asset allocation and cross-border risk management capabilities, banks can continue to improve their international competitiveness under conditions of higher-level opening up.
(4) China’s banking industry should be committed to building an open financial ecosystem with diversified entities, complete product systems, transparent rules, and controllable risks. Under this system, the banking industry can not only effectively connect with the international financial market and improve its ability to allocate global capital and financial resources, but also better serve the development of the real economy through a multi-level financial service system and support the implementation of major national strategies. With the continuous improvement of the level of opening up to the outside world, China's banking industry will further strengthen its functional role in resource allocation, risk management and rule connection in the process of serving the international operations of enterprises and participating in cross-border financial cooperation, and play a constructive role in the global financial governance system, providing important support for international financial stability and global economic growth.
(Author’s affiliation: National Institute for Opening up, w88 casino; w88 casino of International Business, w88 casino. This article is a phased result of the Beijing Publicity and Culture High-level Talent Training Funding Project "Research on Financial Support for the High-Quality Development Path of Beijing's Cultural Industry")
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