(Yicai) June 19 -- Senior officials from Chinese financial regulatory agencies delivered keynote speeches at this year's Lujiazui Forum, conveying significant policy signals and demonstrating a firm commitment to reforms, opening up, and serving the real economy.

The two-day Lujiazui Forum kicked off in Shanghai's Pudong New Area yesterday. Themed 'Financial Opening-up and Cooperation for High-Quality Development in a Changing Global Economy,' this year's edition host more than 70 Chinese and foreign experts, international financial organizations, institutions, and government departments.

PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng: Promoting Int’l Monetary System Reform

Global financial governance was the key focus of Pan Gongsheng's speech at the Lujiazui Forum yesterday, as the governor of the People's Bank of China signaled the active promotion of reforms to the global monetary and payment systems.

The Chinese yuan has become the world's second-largest trade financing currency and the third-biggest global payment currency based on comprehensive calculations, with its ranking in the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights rising to third, Pan said.

The international monetary system may continue to evolve toward a framework featuring coexistence, competition, and mutual checks and balances among a few sovereign currencies, Pan predicted, adding that internationally dominant currencies have global public good attributes.

Having a single sovereign currency bearing this responsibility creates instability issues, such as conflicts between its interests and global public goods, spillovers of its fiscal and financial problems to the global stage, and risks of currency instrumentalization and weaponization during geopolitical conflicts, he explained.

Regarding the cross-border payment system reform, Pan expressed the need to promote diversified development.

NFRA Director Li Yunze: Opening-up and Cooperation Are Key Themes of Our Times

Opening-up and cooperation are the main themes of the financial development of our time, Li Yunze, director of the National Financial Regulatory Administration, said during his keynote speech at the Lujiazui Forum yesterday.

Foreign banks and insurance institutions have assets worth over CNY7 trillion (USD973.6 billion) in China, and their businesses continue to expand, he noted. Foreign insurance companies' share of the Chinese market has more than doubled to 9 percent now from 4 percent in 2013, with overseas lenders accounting for nearly 20 percent of the Chinese derivatives market.

Meanwhile, Chinese financial institutions have established extensive presence across more than 70 countries and regions globally, Li added.

China's growing and upgrading consumer demand presents enormous opportunities for financial services, according to Li. China leads the world in terms of consumption of automobiles, mobile phones, and home appliances, and its service consumption has entered a phase of rapid growth, with overall consumption still having growth potential about 10 percentage points higher than developed countries, he said.

In terms of technological innovation, China has achieved continuous breakthroughs in aerospace, quantum technology, artificial intelligence, and other fields, becoming one of the world's most active innovation hubs, Li pointed out.

The NFRA is vigorously promoting pilot programs for equity investments by financial asset management companies and merger and acquisition loans for technology enterprises, he added.

SAFE Head Zhu Hexin: New QDII Investment Quotas

Zhu Hexin, deputy governor of the PBOC and head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, announced a series of new bidirectional opening-up measures at the Lujiazui Forum yesterday, including the nationwide expansion of multinational companies' integrated Chinese yuan and foreign currency capital pool policies, green foreign debt policy pilots, and measures to improve capital management for Chinese firms' overseas listings.

"We will soon issue a new batch of qualified domestic institutional investor investment quotas to orderly meet domestic enterprises' reasonable overseas investment demand," Zhu said.

As of May 31, China's approved QDII quotas totaled USD167.8 billion across 189 licensed institutions. In May last year, the SAFE allocated a total of USD2.3 billion in new QDII quotas to 53 institutions, marking the first quota increase in a year.

CSRC Chairman Wu Qing: Deepening Start Market's '1+6' Reform

The China Securities Regulatory Commission will continue to fully leverage the Nasdaq-style Start Market's demonstration effect by launching '1+6' policy measures, Chairman Wu Qing said at the Lujiazui Forum yesterday.

The measures include the launch of a new "growth tier" focused on serving unprofitable technology startups that have achieved major technological breakthroughs, strong business prospects, and sustained research and development investment.

Establishing the growth tier represents an opportunity to revive the Star Market's fifth listing standard, which allows unprofitable companies to go public, Wu noted.

The Star Market's fifth listing standard is a special pathway that imposes no requirements on an applicant's profits or revenue. However, it does require that the company's core business or products have received approval from relevant central government authorities and demonstrate significant market potential and milestone progress.

Other reforms include expanding the eligible sectors under the fifth listing standard beyond biomedicine to add fields such as AI, commercial aerospace, and the low-altitude economy, introducing a professional institutional investor system, and piloting an initial public offering pre-review mechanism.

Editor: Futura Costaglione