China's CIPS is on track for its busiest year since launch as yuan use climbs

What happened

China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, launched in 2015, is having its strongest year yet. Through October, it moved 182.8 trillion yuan, or $27.4 trillion, topping all of 2025 by Bloomberg's calculations using system data.

Momentum has not been a straight line. After a 43% surge in 2024, annual growth slipped to 3% in 2025 before picking back up this year. There were flashpoints too: state-backed Shanghai Securities News reported a single-day record of 1.22 trillion yuan in April, attributing the spike to heightened Middle East tensions and the yuan's relative steadiness.

Why the jump matters

Beijing has been pushing to broaden the yuan's role in global trade and finance as top leaders aim for a "powerful currency." Rising trade and the growing use of yuan in settlements have fed into CIPS's volumes, and the system is a key plank of that strategy.

Both trends are likely to continue." He also pointed to the 2025 slowdown being partly a base effect after 2024's jump, noting that CIPS may have already absorbed the easier corridors and firms that can nudge partners to settle in yuan. Other countries promoting their own networks are adding competition.

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For your portfolio

CIPS is a wholesale clearing and settlement rail approved by the People's Bank of China, and its footprint keeps widening. It lists 214 institutions connected directly and 1,651 linked indirectly, with participants mainly from Asia. "Therefore, the steady increase in direct and indirect participants in CIPS is perhaps more important than the annual transaction value."

In plain English: more users and use cases can make yuan flows stickier, even as rival systems vie for traffic. Watch who joins, how often it is used, and whether trade settlement in yuan keeps rising. Those are the telltales for currency diversification and payment plumbing that could ripple through rates, FX exposures, and China-linked assets in your portfolio.

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