2015: The year the renminbi goes mainstream

WHEN the historians of the future look back, 2014 will go down as the year that the renminbi came of age as an international currency, and 2015 as the year it went mainstream.

Many of the regulatory and market changes that rolled out over the past 12 months were subtle technical shifts and we are yet to feel their full individual impact, but their cumulative effect is that today, the renminbi has all the basic attributes of a global trade and investment currency.

But despite the substantial widening and deepening of renminbi investment channels into and out of China, the streamlining of trade settlement paperwork and the growth of the offshore market, the renminbi still feels instinctively exotic to many potential users.