China will expand a program allowing multinational companies to centrally manage cross-border funds in both yuan and foreign currencies nationwide from Sept. 14, 2026, under a notice jointly issued by the People’s Bank of China and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange on Aug. 14. The rules are aimed at improving fund concentration and use within multinational groups, deepening financial opening and supporting the real economy. The framework defines cash pooling as centralized management of domestic and overseas funds through cash sweeping, liquidity rebalancing, centralized current-account receipts and payments, and netting settlement. Financial institutions, local government financing platform companies and real estate enterprises are barred from participating, although a finance company may serve as the lead enterprise. Each group must appoint a domestic member enterprise with independent legal-person status as the lead entity for filing, operations, reporting and feedback. To qualify, companies must have genuine business needs, sound cross-border fund management and internal controls, supporting electronic systems, and no major breaches of cross-border receipts and payments rules in the past two years. They must also meet one of two size tests: combined cross-border receipts and payments of domestic member companies of at least 700 million yuan in the previous year, or combined domestic operating revenue of at least 1 billion yuan and overseas operating revenue of at least 200 million yuan equivalent. If the lead enterprise is registered in a pilot free trade zone, those thresholds are halved. A central feature of the new rules is the ability to centralize member companies’ foreign-debt and overseas-lending quotas at group level. The initial cross-border financing leverage ratio is set at 2 and the macroprudential adjustment parameter at 1.75 for foreign debt, while the overseas-lending leverage ratio is 1 and the macroprudential adjustment coefficient is 0.6. Foreign-currency balances are subject to a 0.5 conversion factor in both cases, a design that the notice says encourages greater use of the yuan. The lead enterprise must open a domestic master account with a qualified partner bank and may designate one overseas member enterprise to open a non-resident account for centralized management of offshore funds. The notice streamlines filing with local SAFE branches, eases some member-change procedures, repeals the previous 2019 rules on cross-border centralized fund management, and folds new and existing business into the new regime. Authorities said they will continue refining cross-border fund-management policies for multinationals.