Record transactions of yuan in September: SWIFT

The yuan set a global transactions record in September amid a heightened effort to internationalize the Chinese currency.

The yuan accounted for 1.72 percent of global payments in September, up from 1.64 percent in August, according to Society for Worldwide International Financial Telecommunications (Swift), a global financial transaction information network.

The value of transactions in yuan increased 13.2 percent and the currency consolidated its rank as the seventh-most used currency in the world, Swift said.

The yuan is primarily used as a trade settlement currency, but it is worth noting that the yuan is steadily making progress as an investment currency, Alex Medana, Hong Kong-based director of securities markets for Asia-Pacific at Swift, said in a report released yesterday.

"In the first nine months of 2014, 28 percent of all confirmed equity transactions outside China's mainland and Hong Kong are settled in yuan. That compared with 16 percent during the same period two years ago," Medana said.

Yuan transactions in all the offshore yuan centers rose for the first nine months this year with Singapore growing at the fastest year-on-year rate of 574 percent. Luxembourg followed with a jump of 517 percent, with Britain third with 236 percent growth.

The value of transactions among offshore yuan centers outside China's mainland and Hong Kong increased ninefold in the past two years, indicating more active international use of the currency.

This year, China started direct trading between the yuan and the Singapore dollar, euro and the British pound after similar links were set up with the US, Australian and New Zealand dollars, as well as the yen.

China has also appointed yuan clearing banks in Frankfurt, Paris and Luxembourg, with quotas granted to investors in these markets to access China's domestic capital markets.

Earlier this month, the UK raised 3 billion yuan (US$490 million) through the world's first offshore sovereign yuan bond and kept the proceeds in its foreign exchange reserves.