CHINA’S yuan broke into the top five as a world payment currency in November, overtaking the Canadian dollar and the Australian dollar, global transaction services organization the SWIFT said yesterday.

    After nearly a year firmly positioned at seventh spot, the yuan reached a record high share of 2.17 percent in global payments by value and is in sight of the Japanese yen, which has a share of 2.69 percent.

    The U.S. dollar, euro and British pound remain the top three world payment currencies.

    “It is a great testimony to the internationalization of the yuan and confirms its transition from an ‘emerging’ to a ‘business as usual’ payment currency,” said Wim Raymaekers, head of banking markets at the SWIFT.

    The rise of various offshore yuan clearing centers around the world, including eight new agreements signed with the People’s Bank of China last year, was an important driver fuelling this growth.

    Global yuan payments increased by 20.3 percent in value in December compared with a year earlier, while the growth for payments across all currencies was 14.9 percent for the same period, the SWIFT said.

    Over the last year, yuan payments grew in value by 102 percent compared with an overall yearly growth for all currencies of 4.4 percent.

    The data come as China looks to make the yuan used more internationally in line with its standing as the world’s second-largest economy.

    China’s Ministry of Commerce said last week that it will only issue figures for inward and outward investment in yuan, dropping the U.S. dollar statistic, a move that the ministry acknowledged was partly an effort to push the yuan’s greater international role.

    China is expected to make another push for the inclusion of the yuan in the International Monetary Fund’s in-house currency basket in a review later this year. The main argument against its inclusion in the Special Drawing Rights, a basket of yen, dollars, pounds and euro used as the IMF’s in-house unit of account, is that the yuan is far from freely “usable” or convertible. But that argument has been gradually weakening as yuan offshore trading surges. (SD-Agencies)