Sber Says Ruble-Yuan Payments Still Hit Gaps in the Russia-China Payments Infrastructure

Sberbank’s First Deputy Chairman Alexander Vedyakhin says payments between Russia and China in rubles and yuan have formally shifted to national currencies, but the infrastructure underneath still has “gaps.” For PSPs and banks, the message is simple: the currency pair has changed, but the routing, correspondent banking, and compliance friction have not gone away.

1. Vedyakhin said the payment routes between Russia and China have become much more complicated, with additional intermediary banks inserted into the chain. Those banks often reject payments without giving detailed reasons, which makes routing less about price and speed and more about whether a transaction clears at all.
2. He also said Chinese banks have to balance risk exposure to avoid secondary sanctions. In practice, that narrows the pool of direct correspondents available to Russian banks and prevents the formation of an efficiently working network of direct correspondent relationships.
3. His framing matters for anyone building payment flows in restricted or high-risk corridors: bank selection and payment-chain design have become an operational and compliance-risk exercise, not just a question of better fees or faster settlement.
4. At the 19th Treasury Forum, A7 Deputy General Director for Economics and Finance Irina Akopyan said almost half of the payment problems with China are not sanctions-related. She said 40% of returns are tied to technical document errors, Cyrillic characters in payment details, incorrectly prepared invoices, and an incorrect structure of the payment order.
5. Akopyan added that when a document does not match the standards of a specific receiving bank in a specific province, the payment can be blocked automatically, sent for manual review, and then sit pending. For PSPs and merchants, that is the familiar reminder that local formatting and bank-specific rules can stop a transfer long before sanctions screening does.