China signs up 26 financial institutions for digital-yuan cross-border payments

China’s central bank has brought a fresh batch of financial institutions into its digital-yuan network for cross-border payments, extending a currency that began life as a way to buy noodles in Shenzhen towards the far harder business of moving money between countries.

Reuters reported the expansion on Monday, the latest in a steady run of moves designed to push the e-CNY past its domestic comfort zone.

The recruitment of more banks is the unglamorous machinery of that ambition. A central bank digital currency is only as useful as the institutions willing to handle it, and the People’s Bank of China has spent the past year steadily widening the circle of lenders authorised to run e-CNY operations.

Earlier in 2026 it lined up a further dozen institutions, among them Shanghai Pudong Development Bank and China Everbright Bank, to deepen both retail use at home and the plumbing for payments abroad.

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Cross-border is where the strategic intent has always sat. Beijing, alongside several other ministries and agencies, has committed to pilots that would let the digital yuan settle trade with partners including Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.

The thread running through that list is countries China trades with heavily and would prefer to pay without routing every transaction through the dollar-based correspondent-banking system.

The scale at home is already large. By the end of November 2025, e-CNY transactions had reached 3.48 billion in number and around 16.7 trillion yuan in value, roughly $2.37tn, according to PBOC figures.

That is a substantial domestic footprint, though still a rounding error against the volumes that move through conventional cross-border rails every day. Domestic adoption was the easy part.

International settlement is the part that touches sanctions regimes, capital controls, and the question of how much of its financial system Beijing is willing to make legible to outsiders.

China has not been idle on the design side either. From the start of 2026 it began allowing banks to pay interest on digital-yuan wallets, a change that nudges the e-CNY from a pure payment token towards something closer to a digital deposit, and one more incentive for users and institutions to hold it rather than convert straight out.

The wider context is a long argument about who controls the rails of global finance. Western central banks have moved cautiously on the technology, and we wrote that China’s digital currency was coming whether or not other major economies kept pace, a forecast that looks less speculative with each institution Beijing adds. The digital yuan still settles a tiny fraction of cross-border trade. The direction of travel is no longer in doubt.

How many banks have signed on in this latest round, and which ones, will shape how quickly the cross-border pilots scale. The PBOC has not detailed the next set of go-live dates.