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China has authorized 12 additional commercial banks to operate the digital yuan, more than doubling the number of licensed institutions to 22. This marks the most significant growth since the currency’s debut in 2019.
The newly approved banks, including Bank of Beijing, Bank of Jiangsu, Bank of Nanjing, Bank of Ningbo, Bank of Suzhou, China Citic Bank, China Everbright Bank, China Guangfa Bank, China Minsheng Bank, China Zheshang Bank, Huaxia Bank, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank, have connected to the central bank’s digital yuan system. They will begin offering digital yuan services once they complete the necessary operational and technical preparations, the People’s Bank of China announced yesterday.
Prior to this expansion, ten banks — the Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China Construction Bank, Industrial Bank, China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and Postal Savings Bank — along with mobile payment giants WeChat Pay and Alipay, operated the digital yuan ecosystem.
As of the end of last year, the pilot program for the digital yuan spanned 17 provincial regions, with 230 million individual wallets and 19.1 million corporate wallets opened. Data from the central bank shows that a total of 3.6 billion transactions, worth approximately 19.5 trillion yuan (around 2.8 trillion USD), had been processed.
The central bank aims to further refine the management system for the digital yuan, explore its role within the monetary hierarchy, and help more commercial banks become operational providers of e-yuan services, said the governor during the Financial Street Forum in Beijing last October.
In January, the central bank released an action plan to enhance the management and service infrastructure for the digital currency, announcing the evolution into the digital yuan 2.0 era. This upgrade expands its functions from physical cash to include demand deposits and time deposits.
This repositioning aims to mitigate potential risks of financial disintermediation during the development process and to enable commercial banks to benefit from their digital yuan activities. This shift is expected to motivate banks to actively participate in building the e-yuan ecosystem, an industry expert previously noted.
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