China's cross-border financing platform facilitates transactions worth over 140 bln USD, SAFE official

By：Belt and Road Portal Update：2022-03-10

As of the end of February 2022, China's cross-border financing service platform has attracted 300 banks to voluntarily participate in its financing scenarios, served over 12,000 enterprises, and facilitated 230,000 financing transactions worth over 140 billion U.S. dollars, reported Economic Information Daily on Wednesday.

The State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE) presided over the launch of the platform in 2019, in a bid to ease the difficulties faced by small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises in cross-border financing and by banks in risk control, said Zhang Tiecheng, head of the SAFE's Science and Technology Department in a recent interview.

The platform aims to establish an end-to-end mechanism for information sharing and verification among government, banks, insurance companies and enterprises, said Zhang. It has developed five application scenarios of financing and two of foreign exchange policy facilitation, promoting direct financing to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), he noted.

The five financing scenarios include export receivables financing, authorized verification of enterprises' cross-border credit information, logistics financing settlement of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, export credit insurance financing and financing of China-Europe freight train.

In the year 2022, the SAFE will continue to expand application scenarios of the platform, including ones that are related with the Belt and Road Initiative, said Zhang, noting that further efforts will be made to facilitate cross-border financing of SMEs, promoting steady and sound development of foreign-related economy.