Representatives and Consultants Offer Strategies for Cross-Border Finance, AI Reconstructs Foreign Trade Full-Process Ecosystem | Two Sessions Observation

China Times (chinatimes.net.cn) Reporter Fu Le - Two Sessions Coverage

Currently, globalization and digital transformation are accelerating integration, with China’s cross-border trade steadily increasing. During the National Two Sessions, delegates and committee members focused on optimizing cross-border financial services, AI technology reconstructing the entire cross-border trade process, and other areas to support high-quality foreign trade development.

Li Huiqiong, a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and a KPMG China advisor, told this reporter that efforts should be made to improve the level of cross-border financial services.

A relevant person in charge from Nantian Information also stated to the reporter that AI services are not just simple technological stacking but are deeply integrated into financial scenarios to safeguard the “last mile” of financial services.

Two Sessions Propose Focus on Cross-Border Finance

Data released by the General Administration of Customs on March 10 shows that in the first two months of 2026, China’s total import and export value of goods was 7.73 trillion yuan, an 18.3% increase year-on-year. In 2025, China’s total import and export value of goods surpassed 45 trillion yuan, reaching 45.47 trillion yuan, a 3.8% increase.

The recently released government work report explicitly called for efforts to stabilize the scale of foreign trade, optimize its structure, and promote innovative development. It guides enterprises to optimize global market layouts, advance trade and investment integration, and develop both domestic and international trade. It also emphasizes actively expanding imports, promoting balanced trade development, improving cross-border trade facilitation, creating new forms of intelligent economy, deepening “AI+” initiatives, accelerating the adoption of new-generation smart terminals and intelligent agents, and promoting the commercialization and scaling of AI in key industries, cultivating new business models and formats rooted in intelligence.

During the Two Sessions, many delegates and committee members actively proposed suggestions on cross-border finance. Lin Zhiying, a deputy to the National People’s Congress, suggested supporting new business formats such as cross-border e-commerce, SaaS services, and digital content exports in Hong Kong to achieve efficient cross-border settlement, further reduce enterprise cross-border payment costs, and improve capital flow efficiency, aiming to make Hong Kong a cross-border financial service hub for tech companies in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Chen Siqing, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and former chairman of Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, proposed that the efforts of finance to support high-quality foreign trade need to be further intensified, including embedding into the overseas comprehensive service “new” system, meeting the “new” financial needs of outbound enterprises, helping to build a “new” pattern of cross-border RMB, and optimizing services for outbound “new” business formats.

Lin Long’an, a member of the CPPCC and president of the Greater Bay Area Import and Export Business Association, suggested supporting factor guarantees to reduce enterprise operating costs, optimizing cross-border financing services, improving infrastructure such as cross-border logistics and overseas warehouses, and enhancing the efficiency of cross-border comprehensive services.

In recent years, China’s foreign exchange management departments have continuously deepened institutional opening-up, optimized policies for facilitating cross-border trade, relied on digitalization to build an integrated cross-border financial service platform, focusing on efficient settlement and capital connectivity, and creating a digital cross-border financial service ecosystem to strongly support high-quality foreign trade development.

Zeng Gang, chief expert and director of the Shanghai Financial and Development Laboratory, told this reporter that guiding enterprises to optimize global market layouts and promote trade-investment integration means that policy goals have extended from simply stabilizing trade scale to supporting enterprises to deploy production, investment, and sales globally in a synchronized manner.

Zeng Gang pointed out that this requires more systematic financial support. First, cross-border investment and financing coordination are needed. Enterprises building factories and making acquisitions abroad require banks to provide overseas project financing, M&A loans, and equity tools like AIC equity investment funds, forming a dual drive of debt and equity. Second, risk hedging must be comprehensive. With market diversification, currency exposure becomes more complex, requiring guidance for enterprises to use foreign exchange derivatives and export credit insurance to cover multiple risks such as exchange rate, political, and credit risks. Third, RMB settlement should be embedded into the investment chain. Promoting a complete closed loop of “trade collection and overseas reinvestment” in RMB can create synergy with strategies to expand cross-border RMB use and trade-investment integration. Fourth, internal and external trade financial connectivity should be enhanced. Under the framework of integrated domestic and foreign trade, reducing capital friction for dual-track operations and facilitating export-to-domestic sales financing can enable efficient flow of financial resources between domestic and international markets.

AI Reconstructs the Entire Cross-Border Trade Process

The road of cross-border trade is not smooth—frequent exchange rate fluctuations, slow capital flows, high transaction costs, and complex compliance requirements pose significant challenges for enterprises operating across borders.

For a long time, small and medium-sized cross-border enterprises have faced issues such as limited financing channels, high interest rates, lack of credit, and no collateral assets. These problems mainly stem from the fact that many of these small cross-border e-commerce sellers are light-asset companies with small scale, seasonal sales fluctuations, and a lack of effective collateral, making it difficult to obtain suitable financing products and services from traditional financial institutions. This further constrains their cross-border business expansion.

To address the financing difficulties of small and medium-sized cross-border e-commerce sellers and build a digital credit system for cross-border enterprises, the industry is focusing on data and cross-border scenarios, launching credit-based, online financing products with financial institutions to break through light-asset credit bottlenecks and stabilize foreign trade. For example, Lianlian Digital has partnered with financial institutions to create a fully online cross-border financial service system, with some products already pre-approved for credit, enabling zero manual intervention, application approval in as fast as one minute, and disbursement in three seconds.

A relevant person from Lianlian Digital told this reporter that by leveraging big data analysis to build digital risk control models, they have improved user profiling, shortened information delivery chains, reduced circulation costs and lending risks for financial institutions, and enhanced the financing efficiency for cross-border e-commerce companies. Emerging technologies also ensure the security of digital assets such as transaction flows, order data, foreign exchange settlement data, and advertising data for outbound enterprises, while promoting the creditworthiness of data assets for small and medium-sized outbound companies.

In areas like payment settlement and cross-border clearing, Nantian Information relies on AI capabilities such as “computing power base, model service platform, AI Agent, and industry applications,” using trust innovation adaptation to optimize transaction links, strengthen risk control, and improve reconciliation efficiency. In cross-border settlement applications, AI-powered monitoring enables transparent supervision, improving transaction compliance and ensuring the stable operation of payment systems.

Payan Ying enhances KYC accuracy and anti-fraud capabilities through machine learning and other AI technologies. In fund management, Payan Ying introduces blockchain technology to provide real-time, transparent fund management services for cross-border e-commerce companies in markets like the US, Singapore, and the UK, helping them improve transaction stability and immediacy amid volatile foreign exchange markets, and reducing operational costs.

In areas such as compliance review, customer identity verification, and document validation, Lianlian Digital’s AI intelligent risk control system can perform real-time compliance checks and automated data analysis. For example, optical character recognition (OCR) technology can automatically extract required documents for cross-border payments, assess compliance relevance, and flag anomalies, enabling a closed-loop process without manual review. In the field of cross-border intelligent operations, Lianlian International has launched the LOOPAI AI intelligent service platform for outbound merchants, helping them generate product descriptions and localized marketing content instantly, increasing product and service exposure on major e-commerce platforms and search engines, and boosting cross-border business growth.

Editor: Feng Yingzi Chief Editor: Zhang Zhiwei