Key facts
- Flavio Figueiredo, Citi's global head of foreign exchange, said the bank's role is to help Chinese clients do business abroad.
- Marc Luet, Citi's Japan, North Asia and Australia banking head, said China-related revenue has grown at a double-digit rate for several years.
- Figueiredo said an expectation the yuan could reach 6.5 per dollar by mid next year would be a gain of nearly 3% from 6.67 per dollar on Wednesday.
- Luet said Chinese firms are most active in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, digital industries and the energy-transition supply chain.
- Figueiredo said Chinese clients in Brazil use options as a low-cost hedging tool.
Citi is aiming to grow its currency trading and cross-border businesses by serving Chinese companies as they expand overseas and by supporting wider use of the yuan, senior executives said in interviews with Reuters on the sidelines of the bank's annual China conference in Shanghai, in a report published on November 12, 2026.
Flavio Figueiredo, Citi's global head of foreign exchange, said the bank's role is to help Chinese clients do business abroad, including managing currency risk and invoicing overseas customers in yuan. The strategy aligns Citi with Chinese authorities' efforts to increase use of the yuan, the report said, and follows the bank's licence, won in the previous month, for a fully owned securities business in China.
Marc Luet, Citi's Japan, North Asia and Australia banking head, said revenue from Chinese clients has become one of Citi's most important growth engines, with double-digit growth in China-related business for several years, among the fastest rates the bank sees in Asia. He said Chinese firms are particularly active in electric vehicles, consumer electronics, digital industries and the energy-transition supply chain, and that Citi sees interest and bridges toward Central Asia, where it has a long-standing presence in markets such as Kazakhstan.
Figueiredo said Citi is pitching hedging and derivatives products to Chinese companies expanding into Africa, eastern Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. In Brazil, where benchmark 10-year yields are nearly 10 times higher than in China, he said Citi's Chinese clients use options as a low-cost hedging tool. Citi, which describes itself as the world's biggest foreign exchange dealer, is also pursuing Chinese banks as clients for frontier and emerging markets, he said.
On the yuan, Figueiredo said his view is reasonably bullish. He said an expectation the currency could reach 6.5 per dollar by mid next year would be a gain of nearly 3% from Wednesday's level of 6.67 per dollar. The yuan appeared relatively immune to recent global market turmoil, with market participants perceiving it as a more stable, less volatile asset, he said, adding that wider adoption or use is likely to be a gradual process.