Countries and banks are continuing to build new hubs and support teams as the internationalisation of the RMB continues. The latest SWIFT RMB trackers shows that when it comes to handling global payments in Chinese Renminbi (‘RMB'), Hong Kong still takes the lion's share with over 70% of the market by value. However, over the last two years, an additional set of countries have given chase, gradually increasing their share to 25% in February 2015 compared to 17% in February 2013.

New RMB countries

Singapore and London, which are strong financial centres in their respective regions, played a key role in driving RMB adoption outside of Hong Kong. In the last few months, there has also been acceleration in RMB usage with the emergence of other offshore RMB clearing centres worldwide, including several countries outside of Asia-Pacific. These additional clearing centres include Bangkok, Doha, Frankfurt, Kuala Lumpur, Luxembourg, Paris, Seoul, Toronto and more recently Sydney. They represent the largest share of offshore countries, excluding Hong Kong, using RMB for payments.

Overall share

SWIFT’s RMB Tracker report concludes that, “In February 2015, the RMB fell back to position #7 as world payments currency with a share of 1.81%. This represents a decrease of 20.4% compared to last month, which is likely due to the seasonal effect of the Chinese New Year. Payments across all currencies decreased in value by 9.3% in that same period. The overall negative trend may be due to February being a shorter month.”

ANZ builds RMB capabilities in Shanghai and Hong Kong as cross-border financing grows

ANZ announces a number of senior appointments in its Renminbi (RMB) banking and trading teams, to support growing volumes of RMB denominated cross-border financing for clients, such as:

• Lucy Chen Global Head of RMB Transaction Banking, a new role based in Shanghai. She will oversee the embedding of RMB across the bank’s transaction banking offering and reports to Philippe Jaccard, Global Co-Head of Transaction Banking Products.
• Patrick Wu has been promoted to Deputy Head of Global Markets China and Head of RMB Trading. He will support the build out of ANZ’s Global Markets offering in China, as well as strengthen the bank’s global RMB trading. 
• Kenneth Lau has been appointed Head of Offshore RMB Trading in Hong Kong. He is responsible for building ANZ’s offering across FX and Rates

Xiaoguang Huang, ANZ CEO China and Head of Greater China, said: “These appointments will support the ongoing development of our global RMB offering and ambition to be both the leading bank for RMB in our home markets of Australia and New Zealand, as well as to provide seamless capabilities for clients across our super regional network – as RMB increasingly emerges as a currency of choice in regional trade.”

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CTMfile take: The importance of the RMB in global trade can be seen by the commitment of banks like ANZ to place experienced, high quality people on the ground to support incoming and outgoing Chinese business. Although the volume of RMB based trade could have fallen for the reasons SWIFT suggest, it could might reflect the slowdown in the Chinese economy.