2025 Financial Street Forum: What cooperative dialogue can deliver

Editor's note: Hannan Hussain, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a senior expert at Initiate Futures, an Islamabad-based policy think tank. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The 2025 edition of the Annual Conference of Financial Street Forum (FSF), being held in Beijing from October 27 to 30, brings together over 400 distinguished representatives from more than 30 countries to deliberate on a fundamental theme: "Global Financial Development in an Era of Innovation, Transformation and Restructuring."

Financing has undergone profound changes, with sub-branches such as science and technology finance, green finance, inclusive finance and digital finance collectively forming an important point of policy consideration. Against this backdrop, the 2025 FSF is expected to provide insights into how financial innovation can better serve the real economy and sustain China's steady economic growth.

First, high-quality financial services are central to bolstering the real economy. Therefore, an enduring consensus on science and technology financing and green development support can help extend the requisite policy support for a more stable and self-sufficient industrial system.

This is a central objective of the adopted recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan, and stands to benefit from a deeper investor pulse from senior representatives of top international financial organizations at the forum.

Over the past five years, China's banking and insurance sectors have provided over $24 trillion in new financial support for the real economy, a massive leap that factored smart financing instruments, including equity financing. As financial exchanges deepen links between Chinese institutions and their overseas counterparts, the potential to further advance China's real economy is ample.

China's relaxed monetary policy and targeted financial regulation for major sectors are expected to help build long-term confidence on investment and matchmaking opportunities at the forum.

Global experience suggests that sustained financial inflows to targeted sectors can stagger in the face of downward economic pressures, underlining the need to match comparative strengths among international organizations, business representatives and dynamic small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This is critical to enhance their collective contribution to the real economy.

Optimism runs high, given China's success in bringing nearly 100 companies to the market through initial public offerings between November 2024 and September 2025. Moreover, China is advancing existing policies to further support the growth of the real economy: It is prioritizing stronger coordination between fiscal, monetary and industrial policies, and has put a premium on advancing technological innovation.

These policy imperatives are expected to help expand the participation of foreign SMEs in China's financial sector, increase their market penetration and effectively diversify the pool of contributors to China's economic growth.

As the People's Bank of China recently pointed out, central to China's sustained economic growth is its ability to "prevent and defuse" financial risks across key sectors.

China's pledge to advance a composite of sustained consumption, foreign trade and moderately accommodative monetary policy is a step in that direction. They suggest that the conditions for developing its real economy through well-structured policy enablers are increasingly at the top of the agenda.

Moreover, for global financial representatives attending the forum, such policy certainty and high-quality financial services could prove to be a recipe to further evolve and reform the trajectory of global financial development.

Insights from the 16th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development show that developing countries still face a financing shortfall of trillions of dollars annually. These global necessities underline the imperative to bolster cooperative financial dialogue this week – the lifeblood of the FSF since its inception in 2020.

Finance also can positively influence Beijing's pursuit of structural optimization. The latter has been chief to China's ongoing 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025), generating optimism that the economy is expected to expand by about $4.9 trillion during the period.

At the forum, finance should be viewed as a structural driver. It shows in China's Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, which already offers conducive, internationally efficient settlement solutions. Similarly, over $66 trillion in banking assets by mid-2025 firmly establish China's financial sector as a scalable, high-growth investment magnet for many international financial centers.

These factors underline the broader promise of China's financial sector as a rapidly internationalized growth engine. Specialized SMEs slated to participate in the forum have wide latitude to deepen market access and benefit from an ecosystem of regulatory certainty and high-quality opening up.

Robust financial sector support for development financing has already delivered trillions of yuan in investment in recent years, indicating a strong connection between proposed policy action – to support multiyear financing at home – and resultant deliveries.

Taken together, China's substantial contribution to global economic growth has firm domestic roots, with a resilient, rapidly evolving financial sector demonstrating substantial promise. As the 2025 FSF convenes global leaders and delegations to promote new financial synergies, China's focus on high-quality development, demonstrated financial sector gains and commitment to expanding international cooperation can reinforce finance as a key driver of real economic development and shared prosperity.

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