QRC advisory council members at the first meeting. Qatar Renminbi Centre has become the third largest ICBC-managed clearing facility in the world by volume.

Qatar Renminbi Centre (QRC), the Middle East and North Africa region’s first RMB clearing centre, has cleared more than RMB131bn ($20bn) since June this year, making it the third largest Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC)-managed clearing facility in the world by volume.
“The region’s first RMB centre is on its way to fulfilling its objective of opening the lines of trade more fluidly between the Middle East, North Africa and China,” Kamal Nagi, director at the Qatar Central Bank (QCB) told the first QRC advisory council meeting.
The advisory council comprised representatives of Qatar’s leading banks and financial sector, which include QCB, QNB, Masraf Al Rayan, Qatar Islamic Bank, Commercial Bank, QIIB, Al Khaliji, Standard Chartered, ICBC, the Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority and the Qatar Stock Exchange.
The QCB established the advisory council, with the purpose of promoting market awareness of the benefits of the RMB clearing centre and to propose well-defined market education initiatives.
Highlighting that QRC has received the support of leading banks in Qatar as part of the council, Nagi said this meeting gave an opportunity to update the partners on progress since establishing the centre and to gather feedback on how it can together expand its footprint for the benefit of businesses in the region and in China.
The RMB, the official currency of China, is an important key to international trade. The QRC has been improving ease of transactions between companies in Qatar and across the region and China through offering clearing and settlement services – increasing connectivity between markets that have strong economic and commercial ties.
“Those customers who have already availed of the centre are seeing increased ease in transactions with Chinese counterparties, equating to real savings on the total cost of transaction. With the support of QCB and Qatar-based banks we see room for significant growth positioning Qatar as a hub for RMB transactions in the region,” according to Roger Tang, ICBC Doha representative.
China is the world’s second largest economy and the largest trading nation in the world. This has increased the importance of the RMB, and opened new doors of opportunity for those who trade with the Asian country.
As of last year, 10.6% of total imports to Qatar were from China, second only to the US. Chinese companies are active in the local market, with 15 operating in Qatar in addition to 181 joint ventures with Qatari partners.
Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund decided to include the RMB in the benchmark Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket of currencies, joining the US dollar, euro, Japanese yen, and British pound as of next October.
QRC was opened in April this year, following a memorandum of understanding signed in November 2014 between the representatives of the QCB and People’s Bank of China.
The QRC acts as a hub that conducts and facilitates a wide variety of financial services denominated in RMB. It allows businesses in Qatar and the region to settle their transactions in RMB directly. There are 18 official RMB clearing banks worldwide.
For Qatar and other economies in the region, the QRC will lessen the dependence on the US dollar, while for China; it will provide access to China’s onshore RMB and foreign exchange markets to local financial institutions fostering cross-border use of Renminbi, which is the ninth largest most traded currency in the world.