Affected by complex international situations such as the pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, and trade wars, the international monetary system has shown new changes, and the in-depth development of RMB internationalization has ushered in new opportunities. At the same time, after China has become the world’s second-largest economy and the largest trading nation, it plays an increasingly important role in global trade—how to realize cross-border payment, clearing, and settlement of RMB has become a major challenge.

When talking about cross-border RMB clearing, the Cross-border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) cannot be ignored. As a major and core channel in cross-border RMB clearing, CIPS is one of China’s important financial market infrastructures. It realizes real-time, full-amount clearing and settlement of cross-border RMB businesses across time zones and systems, without the need to open correspondent bank accounts—greatly reducing remittance costs and time consumption. As of the end of June 2022, the CIPS system had 1,341 participants, including 76 direct participants and 1,265 indirect participants, covering 106 countries and regions around the world.

In early August this year, the "Overall Operation of the Payment System in the First Quarter of 2022" released by the People’s Bank of China showed that the business volume of the CIPS system-maintained growth. The role of CIPS has become increasingly prominent as China’s foreign economic exchanges continue to deepen.

As a high-tech enterprise with a strong fintech DNA, Brilliance Technology has long implemented trade finance projects and has been closely following the technological R&D and business expansion trends in the field of cross-border payment and clearing. Currently, Brilliance Technology has formed a professional and experienced service team of over 200 people covering the entire process of R&D, implementation, business testing, and expert consultation. It has successfully supported many banking institutions in safely and efficiently accessing the CIPS payment channel, helped multiple CIPS system participants build comprehensive cross-border RMB business capabilities, and contributed to the development of RMB internationalization.

On the product and technology side, Brilliance Technology makes full use of fintech achievements to build a complete set of business solutions focusing on international settlement and trade finance. These solutions fully cover various business types of international settlement and provide support for foreign exchange and RMB funds and clearing, including a unified regulatory reporting platform, access channel management components, international payment front-end, electronic letter of credit system, etc. The system adopts a model-driven architecture design; through model conversion, it can meet the technical architecture requirements of different banking customers. Moreover, by automating the trade finance settlement business process, it helps banks reduce risks and costs.

Among them, the Brilliance Unified Regulatory Reporting Platform is a system for financial institutions to uniformly report regulatory statistical data to various regulatory systems. It adopts a functional modular design and can adapt to different business needs through flexible parameter settings. The platform can provide interface connections with the regulatory systems of supervisory authorities such as the People’s Bank of China (RCPMIS) and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange (including international balance of payments declaration, foreign exchange settlement and sale receipt and payment declaration, and capital account declaration). It realizes automatic extraction of interface data, provides data validity verification and associated report consistency verification, and automatically sends data and receives feedback information.

In the future, as banking customers have an increasingly urgent need to enhance their cross-border financial capabilities, Brilliance Technology’s cross-border payment business products will also serve as an important part of the trade finance product line. In line with the overall financial digital transformation, independent innovation, business automation, and intelligent upgrading, the company will continue to improve and optimize international cross-border payment channels such as SWIFT, Western Union, and Mastercard, as well as the support for the People’s Bank of China’s onshore foreign currency payment and CIPS. On this basis, it will continuously promote the upgrading of technical solutions, expand more international and China-characteristic payment channels, and help more enterprises embrace global opportunities and explore business prospects worldwide.