30th June, 2026
By Cyrus Tong
On June 16, 2026, in a signing ceremony in Shanghai that received far less attention in Western financial media than it deserved, China made its most consequential move yet toward internationalising the digital yuan.
China Onboards 26 Institutions to Cross-Border e-CNY Platform
The People’s Bank of China formally onboarded the first batch of 26 financial institutions as direct participants in the Cross-border e-CNY Transfer Services platform, known as CBETS, a 24/7 integrated cross-border settlement infrastructure built entirely around China’s central bank digital currency.
This is not an incremental pilot extension.
It is the activation of a live, multi-country, institutional-grade digital payment network.
And for compliance professionals operating in the payments, banking, and FinTech space across Asia and beyond, its implications extend well beyond China’s borders.
- Article content
- Credits: South China Morning Post – What CBETS Actually Is
How CBETS Differs From Traditional Payment Systems
CBETS is an umbrella infrastructure platform developed and operated by e-CNY Centre International Co, a division of the PBOC, which launched its international operations centre in September 2025.
The platform was created by consolidating several existing service modules into a single integrated framework, providing direct digital payment connectivity between the PBOC, foreign central banks, and overseas financial institutions around the clock.
The first cohort of 26 direct participants includes Standard Chartered Bank (China), one of the most prominent foreign bank names in the group, alongside overseas branches and subsidiaries of major Chinese institutions, including Bank of Communications, with coverage spanning Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, the UAE, Qatar, and Brazil.
Participants gain direct access to CBETS settlement infrastructure, bypassing traditional correspondent banking intermediaries and enabling cross-border transactions denominated in e-CNY to settle in significantly reduced timeframes at materially lower cost.
CBETS operates alongside the Cross-border Interbank Payment System, known as CIPS, which Beijing launched in 2015 as an alternative to SWIFT for traditional interbank payments.
Where CIPS handles conventional interbank flows, CBETS provides the digital currency layer on top of that architecture.
The Strategic Context Cannot Be Separated from the Compliance Reality
It is impossible to analyse CBETS purely as a payment infrastructure development without acknowledging the geopolitical architecture in which it sits.
China has been explicit about its intent.
The CBETS platform, alongside the commercial rollout of mBridge, the blockchain-based multi-CBDC settlement platform backed by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, represents a deliberate and systematic effort to build payment infrastructure that reduces reliance on the US dollar-dominated financial system and the SWIFT network through which Western sanctions are transmitted.
By end of November 2025, domestic e-CNY transactions had already reached 3.48 billion in number and approximately 16.7 trillion yuan, roughly 2.37 trillion US dollars in cumulative value.
That domestic footprint is substantial, but it is the international settlement layer that carries the most significant strategic weight.
In January 2026, China evolved the e-CNY from a pure central bank digital currency toward a digital bank deposit model, making it a liability of commercial banks rather than exclusively of the PBOC, and simultaneously began allowing banks to pay interest on digital yuan wallets.
Both changes significantly increase the instrument’s commercial attractiveness relative to competing stablecoin and CBDC solutions.
What the Compliance Function Needs to Understand
For compliance professionals, the CBETS launch creates a set of questions that demand immediate attention regardless of whether your institution is among the first 26 participants.
The first is visibility.
CBETS operates on distributed ledger technology with both on-chain and off-chain settlement capabilities.
The compliance question is not whether the technology is innovative.
The question is what transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and AML obligations attach to institutions accessing the platform, and whether the existing frameworks those institutions operate within are adequate for the nature of the flows CBETS will facilitate.
The second is jurisdictional complexity.
The geographic footprint of the first participant cohort, spanning Southeast Asia, the Gulf, and South America, reflects exactly the corridors where compliance obligations are most layered and where sanctions exposure requires the most careful calibration.
An institution processing e-CNY settlements between China and Qatar, or between Hong Kong and Brazil, is operating across multiple AML regimes, multiple sanctions frameworks, and multiple correspondent banking obligations simultaneously.
The third is the competitive pressure CBETS creates for institutions that are not yet participants.
As the platform scales and the PBOC has been explicit that the 26-institution cohort is a starting point and not an endpoint, institutions that have not yet evaluated their position relative to the e-CNY international infrastructure will find themselves making reactive decisions in an environment that is moving rapidly.
My Take
I have spent over two decades building compliance frameworks across APAC and international markets.
And what strikes me most about the CBETS launch is not the technology or the geopolitics.
It is the speed.
Twelve months ago, China’s digital yuan international infrastructure was a research project.
Today it is a live network with 26 institutional participants spanning four continents, 24/7 settlement capability, and a commercial structure designed to scale.
The compliance frameworks of the institutions engaging with this infrastructure need to move at the same pace.
Because the fundamental truth about every new payment rail, whether it is stablecoin-based, CBDC-based, or any other architecture, remains constant.
New infrastructure does not create new compliance obligations from scratch.
It creates new contexts in which existing obligations must be applied with precision, judgment, and genuine understanding of what is actually moving through the network and why.
That understanding is the work ahead.
And it is work that cannot wait for the network to mature before it begins.
About the author
Cyrus Tong, an award-winning compliance expert, is the Group Chief Compliance Officer of DCS Group.
