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Sylvia Ma

Mainstream metrics may understate the role of China’s currency in global payments, as a growing share of transactions is now routed through Beijing’s own cross-border payment system and not fully reflected in conventional data sets, analysts say.
This could help explain the gap between Beijing’s official narrative – which describes the yuan as the world’s third-largest payment currency – and readings from tracking systems such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (Swift).
“As alternative systems emerge, Swift will be less of an accurate mirror for international payments,” said Xu Tianchen, senior economist at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Payments conducted through China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) and other bilateral settlement arrangements largely fall outside Swift’s radar, he added, because the network cannot capture transactions that do not use its messaging infrastructure.
“Whether the yuan gains or loses share in Swift statistics is perhaps no longer relevant,” he said.
At the Lujiazui Forum last year, People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng said the yuan had already become the world’s third-largest payment currency.
By contrast, Swift’s monthly data showed the yuan ranking between fourth and sixth globally in terms of payment share in 2025. The latest figures put its share at 2.74 per cent of global payments by value in February, placing it sixth.
A currency’s international standing is typically measured against several benchmarks: share of global payments, use in official reserves and international debt markets, share of foreign exchange turnover and role in commodity pricing and settlement.


Ding Shuang, chief economist for Greater China and North Asia at Standard Chartered, noted that Swift was not the sole measure of cross-border payments, since yuan transactions could also be processed through CIPS and internal banking systems.
As China prioritises building its own cross-border payments infrastructure, the full scale of yuan-denominated transactions might become increasingly difficult for traditional metrics to capture, he added.
At the China Development Forum last month, Pan said the country would steadily promote the “high-level opening up” of its financial sector and deepen the cross-border connectivity of its payment systems.
Zhu Min, former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund and ex-deputy governor of China’s central bank, also called for expanding CIPS to make China’s payment network cheaper, faster and more efficient, as part of broader efforts to advance the yuan’s internationalisation.
Beijing has stepped up efforts to develop alternative cross-border payment systems, which are seen as critical to reducing reliance on US dollar-dominated channels amid rising bilateral tensions and growing concerns over the weaponisation of the US dollar.
It recently carried out the first major update in eight years to the business rules governing CIPS, which previously focused on yuan-denominated payments, with analysts saying Beijing now appeared to be moving towards building the system into a global platform that supports multicurrency settlements and other foreign payment channels.
Data from China’s central bank showed the system had processed a total of 175 trillion yuan (US$25.35 trillion) in 2024, more than 40 per cent higher than the 123 trillion yuan recorded the previous year.


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Many yuan transactions are now routed through China’s own global payment system, which often does not show up in traditional data sets, analysts say


Many yuan transactions are now routed through China’s own global payment system, which often does not show up in traditional data sets, analysts say.


China’s yuan may be going global faster than Western data suggests, analysts say

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Many yuan transactions are now routed through China’s own global payment system, which often does not show up in traditional data sets, analysts say

Many yuan transactions are now routed through China’s own global payment system, which often does not show up in traditional data sets, analysts say