Explore the application of Digital RMB in the securities industry

Ask AI · How the Digital Renminbi 2.0 Era Can Reshape the Securities Industry Ecosystem?

Not long ago, the first nationwide batch of Digital Renminbi smart contract services for paying migrant workers’ wages was launched in Chengdu, Sichuan. As an important national digital financial infrastructure, the Digital Renminbi is accelerating its shift from pilot exploration to a new stage of large-scale application and ecosystem development. For the securities industry, it should proactively integrate into the broader push to promote the Digital Renminbi with a global perspective and systems thinking, and find the right positioning while demonstrating its role in implementing the “Five Pillar Articles” of science and technology finance, green finance, inclusive finance, retirement finance, and digital finance.

By the end of 2025, the People’s Bank of China issued the “Action Plan” titled “On Further Strengthening the Digital Renminbi Management and Service System and Related Financial Infrastructure Construction,” clarifying that, starting January 1, 2026, the Digital Renminbi will enter the 2.0 era, marking a systematic upgrade in areas such as the management system, operating mechanisms, and ecosystem architecture. This transformation brings new development opportunities to the capital market. It not only provides technological support for the securities industry to optimize capital flow and improve service effectiveness, but also opens up new space for business areas such as wealth management, customer service, and the matchmaking between investment and financing—effectively stimulating the industry’s internal driving force to participate in building the Digital Renminbi ecosystem.

From an industry-practice perspective, the securities industry has conducted proactive exploration around Digital Renminbi applications. Pilot programs for financial technology innovation in capital markets in multiple regions have advanced steadily; some institutions, within a compliant framework, have carried out pilot explorations that integrate the Digital Renminbi with securities business, accumulating practical experience that can serve as a reference. The Central Financial Work Conference made a systematic deployment for doing a solid job in the “Five Pillar Articles” of finance. As a key carrier of digital finance, the Digital Renminbi aligns closely with the functions of the capital market. The securities industry should build on its role as a market intermediary and integrate Digital Renminbi applications throughout the whole process of serving the real economy, preventing and controlling financial risks, and deepening financial reform.

In terms of strengthening basic service capability building, the securities industry should proactively benchmark the Digital Renminbi’s top-level design and technical specifications, and accelerate the improvement of business and technology systems that are compatible with the Digital Renminbi’s operations. By strengthening systems iteration, optimizing account services, and unblocking capital flow pathways, it should build a secure, efficient, and compatible digital finance service foundation, laying a solid basis for the implementation of various scenarios. In the fields of inclusive finance and investor services, by leveraging the Digital Renminbi’s convenient inclusiveness and secure, traceable features, it should optimize service processes, lower service thresholds, and enhance the breadth and accessibility of financial services. With more transparent and more trustworthy services, it can strengthen investors’ sense of gain.

Serving the real economy is the fundamental purpose of the securities industry. With the Digital Renminbi’s unique advantages in areas such as capital flow direction, use control, and operating efficiency, the securities industry can further optimize resource allocation and improve the precision of financial services, better supporting technological innovation, industrial upgrading, and the development of small and micro enterprises. It can help drive “financial capital” to deliver targeted support to the key areas and weak links of the real economy. In risk prevention and compliance governance, the Digital Renminbi’s full-process traceability and rule-programmable characteristics provide new tools for penetration-based supervision, anti–money laundering, and investor protection—helping the securities industry improve its risk control system, keep the safety bottom line, and maintain the steady operation of the market.

The securities industry should also seize the major potential of the Digital Renminbi in cross-border payments and funds clearing, and prudently explore compliant applications for scenarios such as cross-border investment and financing and asset allocation. This will help improve cross-border capital flow efficiency, reduce transaction costs, and serve the overall effort of the renminbi’s internationalization and the bidirectional opening of the capital market, so as to strive to build a new institutional framework for a more open economy. (Source of this article: Economic Daily; author: Nie Wuyi)