Chinese Brokerages Accelerate IT Expansion Overseas as Cross-Border Revenue Hits RMB 49.04 Billion in 2025

The internationalization competition among Chinese brokerages is extending from licensing and business operations to IT system development. Over the past two years, leading brokers have progressively deployed IT capabilities overseas, with some beginning to pilot next-generation trading platforms to handle cross-border business demand. Most are currently in the stage of architecture upgrades and system integration. Key developments include: establishing international R&D centers in mainland China to gradually shift overseas development work onshore, while overseas teams focus on maintenance and requirements analysis, and partnering with domestic fintech vendors to achieve self-reliance in core systems; promoting integrated management across domestic and overseas operations by applying mature domestic architecture frameworks to overseas entities; building unified platform architectures that consolidate overseas trading, clearing, and risk control systems to enable data interoperability and capability reuse; and exploring diversified infrastructure paths such as public cloud and data center leasing, while gradually supplementing trading licenses and infrastructure coverage in major markets.

International business growth is the direct driver of IT upgrades at brokerages. In 2025, 14 listed brokers collectively generated RMB 49.04 billion in cross-border revenue, up 22.54% year on year, significantly outpacing the industry's overall revenue growth. CICC's international business revenue accounted for nearly 30% of its total, while leading institutions such as CITIC Securities and Huatai Securities saw overseas revenue contributions exceed 15%. The dual increase in business scale and capital investment has transformed IT from a back-office support function into a core component of product competitiveness. Ultra-fast trading capabilities for institutional clients and global account experiences for retail clients now directly affect client retention and attractiveness.

In the early phase of overseas expansion, Chinese brokerages adopted a lightweight approach focused on setting up offices and obtaining licenses. IT systems were typically deployed in a localized, decentralized manner, resulting in high maintenance costs and fragmented data, account, and risk control systems. As business has expanded from single cross-border investment banking to full-spectrum offerings including global trading, cross-border wealth management, FICC, and cross-border asset management, traditional architectures have struggled to accommodate multi-market rules and integrated service requirements. New-generation platforms employ distributed, cloud-native architectures that can flexibly adapt to different market trading rules and regulatory requirements, offering elastic scaling and rapid iteration capabilities.

Brokerages still face multiple common challenges in IT overseas expansion. Purchased or leased overseas local systems have notable shortcomings: traditional overseas core systems have weak capacity and trading performance, failing to match domestic trading speed requirements. For example, when interfacing with H-share full circulation business, overseas systems cannot withstand the peak trading pressure seen in domestic markets. Such systems are highly closed, with non-open interfaces and databases, making it impossible to support data mining, global risk data aggregation, and enterprise-level fund flow management. Overseas vendors charge high fees for customization and have long iteration cycles, typically measured in quarters, half-years, or even years, which cannot keep pace with fast-evolving business needs such as 24-hour US stock trading and expansion of cross-market connectivity. Automation rates for overseas business operations are generally below 30%, with heavy reliance on manual processes, creating staffing shortages and operational risks.

System fragmentation is another prominent issue. Systems built in silos across different business lines and regions have clear boundaries and data isolation, making it difficult to integrate on-exchange and off-exchange data or individual and institutional business data, and preventing enterprise-level risk metric visibility and global operational decision-making. Different markets require connections to multiple local vendors, with at least one or two different business vendors per country, leading to high communication costs, low priority for requirement iterations, and risks from vendor instability or systems that cannot adapt to regulatory changes or trading volume fluctuations. Differences in domestic and overseas management cultures and the high cost of legacy system transformation also slow progress. In some institutions, overseas IT resources are tightly bound to specific business lines, creating resistance to platform-based transformation. Existing systems already cover dozens of global markets and multiple data centers, with entrenched operational processes where changes can easily trigger operational risks.