Global Supply Chain Finance Reaches $2.65 Trillion! CRIF Unveils 'Three-Layer Defense' for Cross-Border Trust, Solving 4 Key Pain Points

Global supply chain restructuring, rising geopolitical risks, and the rapid development of emerging payment tools such as stablecoins are driving the global supply chain finance market to reach $2.65 trillion by 2025, a 7.5% year-on-year increase. In response, CRIF (China Credit Information Service) today invited experts to reveal four major pain points in cross-border financial trust, emphasizing that UBO (Ultimate Beneficial Owner) identification is key to compliance. CRIF proposes a 'three-layer defense' for UBO to help enterprises and financial institutions build a more comprehensive compliance governance framework—from data reliability and relationship transparency to AI-powered risk decision-making.

CRIF, a global leader in business information and credit risk solutions, hosted its annual forum today (8th) under the theme 'Driving Resilience: Data and Compliance Rebuild Supply Chain Trust.' Focusing on stablecoins, UBO transparency, and AI risk control, the forum aims to help enterprises and financial institutions address cross-border financial challenges and strengthen transaction transparency and risk governance.

The forum brought together experts from industry, government, and academia—including the Technology Development Association, cryptocurrency exchanges, banking legal and financial institutions, and fintech—to discuss UBO verification, digital finance, digital asset transactions, and stablecoin regulation. The goal is to help enterprises grasp key solutions for cross-border payment innovation, compliance requirements, and supply chain management.

CRIF Highlights Four Key Pain Points in Cross-Border Financial Trust—UBO Is the Key to Compliance

CRIF focused today’s forum on global supply chain restructuring, tightening cross-border financial regulations, and the need for transparent corporate control. As global trade patterns rapidly evolve, cross-border finance faces four major pain points: inconsistent reporting standards across countries, enterprise data scattered across different jurisdictions, difficulty in penetrating equity and trust structures, and the inability to promptly block high-risk transactions. With multinational groups, affiliated companies, offshore entities, agents, and trust structures becoming increasingly intertwined, relying solely on traditional KYC and surface-level corporate data is no longer sufficient to handle complex cross-border transaction scenarios.

Rosalind Kuo, CRIF’s Asia Compliance Business Lead, stated: 'Cross-border compliance is evolving from traditional KYC to UBO transparency. For financial institutions, the ultimate beneficial owner is not just a data field in customer review processes, but a critical foundation for identifying counterparties, assessing fund flows, understanding sanction risks, and fulfilling financial due diligence.'

CRIF found that in cross-border financial practice, a 25% transparency threshold is a key starting point for financial institutions to disclose information and conduct customer due diligence. The 50% sanctions threshold is a crucial benchmark for assessing counterparty and asset flow risks. In other words, UBO identification is not just about identifying shareholding percentages on shareholder lists, but about determining who truly holds control and whether they may be linked to sanctions or asset freeze risks. Without penetrating behind-the-scenes control relationships, institutions may overlook real UBO risks in seemingly compliant transactions.

Furthermore, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) requires UBO information to meet three criteria: adequacy, accuracy, and timeliness. This means financial institutions cannot rely solely on one-time checks or static list comparisons, but must continuously monitor corporate equity changes, affiliated company updates, negative events, and cross-border data refreshes. With inconsistent reporting standards and varying update frequencies across countries, the quality of UBO data directly impacts credit reviews, transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, and supply chain finance decisions.

Cross-border supply chain finance has grown rapidly in recent years, evolving from a simple financing tool into a core mechanism for enterprises to strengthen liquidity management and supply chain resilience. According to the 'World Supply Chain Finance Report 2026,' the global supply chain finance market will reach $2.65 trillion in 2025, up 7.5% from $2.46 trillion in 2024. Funding usage has exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, growing nearly 7% year-on-year, indicating rising corporate demand for cross-border capital efficiency and supply chain financial services.

In this trend, stablecoins—with their 24/7 instant settlement and peer-to-peer transfer capabilities—can reduce transaction friction caused by traditional correspondent banking, batch settlements, and cross-time-zone operations, shortening cash conversion cycles across supply chain上下游. They are becoming a key option for enterprises exploring cross-border settlement efficiency.

However, the immediacy of stablecoins also drastically shortens compliance review windows. When funds can cross borders in seconds, banks and related parties have less time to perform KYC, transaction monitoring, sanctions list screening, and UBO verification. Relying on traditional delayed screening and manual reviews may fail to identify high-risk transactions in time, potentially allowing risks to spread before monitoring is complete.

To address this, CRIF is collaborating with Dr. Wang Innovation (BaaS) to integrate UBO verification, sanctions lists, and whitelisted valid addresses directly into stablecoin infrastructure services. On the policy front, a new phase has begun: Taiwan’s legislature passed the 'Virtual Asset Service Act' on June 30 in its third reading, moving toward a more comprehensive licensing system and market order regulation. It strengthens oversight of Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) and establishes a regulatory foundation for stablecoin issuance and management.

CRIF emphasizes that the key to cross-border financial governance in the stablecoin era lies not only in payment speed but also in whether foundational data can support real-time decision-making. Only by establishing a trustworthy, complete, and updatable UBO data foundation can financial institutions balance efficiency, compliance, and supply chain management needs while innovating in cross-border payments.

Cross-Border Finance Should Have a Three-Layer UBO Defense

Given the increasing complexity of cross-border financial scenarios, CRIF has partnered with LexisNexis, leveraging its international-grade databases such as AML Name Screening, to propose a three-layer UBO defense. This framework helps enterprises and financial institutions build a more comprehensive compliance governance structure—from data reliability and relationship transparency to AI-driven risk decision-making.

The first layer is the 'Data Reliability Defense.' CRIF integrates corporate basic data, credit risk, equity structure, director and supervisor information, affiliated companies, group relationships, negative events, and international data to help financial institutions fill UBO data gaps. This reduces reliance on self-reported corporate data or fragmented public information, improving the accuracy of customer reviews and risk assessments.

The second layer is the 'Relationship Transparency Defense.' CRIF goes beyond identifying individual companies, using equity chains, control hierarchies, group mapping, and supply chain networks to help financial institutions uncover the real beneficial owners, affiliated entities, and potential sanction risks behind surface-level counterparties. Through relationship transparency, banks and enterprises can better understand the paths of fund flows, control, and risk transmission, preventing high-risk entities from hiding behind complex structures.

The third layer is the 'AI Risk Decision Defense.' CRIF helps integrate UBO data into KYC/KYB, credit reviews, sanctions screening, supply chain finance risk control, and suspicious transaction monitoring. By combining AI risk control, big data analytics, negative news, and relationship graph technology, it accelerates risk management decisions. With AI-assisted risk prioritization, anomaly detection, and real-time alerts, enterprises and financial institutions can shift from 'post-event remediation' to 'pre-event warnings,' further enhancing compliance efficiency and decision accuracy in cross-border transactions.

CRIF believes that in today’s complex business environment, both data reliability and processing speed are equally important. The value of AI risk control does not lie in replacing data governance, but in building on high-quality, verifiable, and context-rich data to transform fragmented information into actionable risk scores, alerts, and decision support—helping institutions quickly grasp the underlying relationship networks and risk transmission paths of enterprises.