Citi Wins a China Brokerage Licence After Five Years

The China Securities Regulatory Commission approved Citigroup Global Markets Holdings on 23 October 2026 to establish a wholly owned securities company in China, Citigroup Securities (China) Company Limited, headquartered in Shanghai. Citi announced the approval the same day. Xinhua, reporting from Beijing, described it as the latest step in opening the financial sector further to foreign institutions.

Caixin reported that Citigroup filed the application in December 2021, which puts the wait at nearly five years. The licence allows the new entity to offer equities brokerage, securities underwriting, securities research and principal trading to domestic and foreign clients. Citi said it will now complete the statutory and regulatory procedures required to establish the company and prepare to begin operations, so no trading date has been set.

The seventh firm through the door

Citi is the seventh foreign institution to secure full ownership of a mainland brokerage, following J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, UBS and Mizuho. It is also a return rather than an arrival: the bank exited its Orient Citigroup joint venture six years ago, and this licence brings it back to onshore securities as a sole owner rather than a partner.

The commercial logic sits in a number Citi published with the announcement. The bank says it has helped Chinese clients raise more than $40 billion in global capital markets so far in 2026, all of it underwritten from offshore. It also says it serves 70 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies operating in China, and that it has been in the country for nearly 125 years, having established a local entity in 1902. The licence lets it underwrite onshore deals for the same client list instead of routing them through Hong Kong, London or New York.

Wenjie Zhang, Citi China country officer and banking head, said the firm would focus on "building a high-caliber local team" and that the securities company "will be an important part of Citi's strategy in China".

Opening, in the same week as closing

The approval arrived in a week of similar signals. The People's Bank of China approved a Visa subsidiary to set up a bank card clearing institution in the country, which Visa called a milestone towards serving China's domestic payments market. At the Annual Conference of the Financial Street Forum in Beijing, CSRC chairman Wu Qing restated the commitment to expanding high-level opening up.

That runs alongside the opposite movement in technology. One week earlier, on 16 October, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology proposed bringing large language models, AI agents and computing clusters into China's export control catalogue, with registration provisions that took effect immediately. The two policies are not in conflict so much as aimed at different things: capital is being invited in while technology is being metered on the way out.

The honest reading of the five-year wait is that it says more than the approval does. Citi filed in December 2021, when the US-China financial relationship looked materially different, and the licence has arrived now. Nothing in the regulator's decision explains the timing, and neither Citi nor the CSRC has offered one.

What the announcement does not contain is any figure for what the business is expected to earn, how many people it will employ, or when it will open. Citi disclosed registered capital nowhere in its statement. The bank has said that between 2020 and 2026 it invested almost $600 million in China and intends to keep investing in the franchise and its technology, but that is a historic total across all its China operations rather than a commitment to the new entity.