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Hong Kong’s yuan pool is growing. Can it turn liquidity into global demand?
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Daisy WuPublished: 9:00am, 7 Sep 2026
Hong Kong’s top financial regulators have urged local banks to make greater use of the city’s growing pool of offshore yuan liquidity, while also flagging the need to prepare for a coming wave of autonomous AI systems used in the financial sector.
Speaking at the Hong Kong Association of Banks (HKAB) Distinguished Speaker Luncheon, Eddie Yue Wai-man, chief executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), called on lenders to leverage their international networks to expand the Chinese currency’s global reach.
“We want your bank to use your global network to help us channel all this renminbi liquidity to the world,” Yue said.
Regulators, he added at the Friday luncheon, were prepared to scrap the funding cap on Hong Kong’s yuan liquidity facility altogether if demand continued to grow. The specialised facility, which provides commercial banks with yuan funding that can then be lent to customers, currently operates under a 500 billion yuan (US$74.5 billion) quota, expanding from the previous 200 billion yuan in July.
“There will not be any cap to it,” Yue said, adding that the facility’s quota could be expanded as demand increased and existing capacity was well used. He also urged lenders to report operational problems and difficulties faced by clients so the system could be refined.
The push comes as yuan-denominated transactions accounted for about 30 per cent of China’s total trade settlement last year, up from 13 per cent in 2019, Goldman Sachs found in May. The shift has coincided with rapid growth in dim sum bonds – yuan-denominated bonds issued in Hong Kong – as well as offshore Chinese government bonds.
However, Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) chief executive Julia Leung Fung-yee cautioned that wider international use of the yuan could stall unless financial institutions developed a deeper suite of yield-bearing and risk-hedging products.
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