BRICS+ Currency Alternatives in 2026: What Every EM Investor Needs to Know About De-Dollarisation

The Chinese yuan now accounts for 4.7% of global SWIFT payment messages. In 2020, that number was 1.9%.

That’s not a collapse. It’s not a revolution. It’s a measurable, data-confirmed shift — a gradual reweighting of the global payment architecture that is happening in real-time, at the pace of trade agreements, bilateral settlement deals, and central bank reserve decisions. Whether you find that geopolitically alarming or operationally irrelevant, the movement has specific, analysable implications for how EM investors should construct their portfolios. Here is the investor’s version — not the geopolitical pundit’s version — of what’s actually being built, and what it means for your capital.

BRICS started as a Goldman Sachs acronym in 2001 — Jim O’Neill’s shorthand for the four largest emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China) that Goldman projected would collectively surpass the G7 by 2050. South Africa joined in 2010. The concept became a formal diplomatic forum.

The expansion changed the calculus. At the Kazan Summit in October 2024, BRICS formally admitted the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Iran as full members. A new tier of “partner countries” — including Indonesia, Vietnam, Nigeria, and Turkey — was also established.

The resulting BRICS+ bloc, by IMF 2024 estimates, represents approximately 36% of global GDP measured at purchasing power parity. In nominal USD terms: closer to 28%. By population: over 45% of the world.

Why does this matter for investors? Because BRICS+ nations are simultaneously the world’s largest commodity producers (Saudi Arabia, Russia, UAE in energy; Brazil in agricultural commodities; South Africa in metals), the largest consumer markets in their respective regions, and increasingly the architects of financial infrastructure that operates on tracks parallel to Western-dominated clearing systems like SWIFT and CHIPS.

Understanding what’s being built — not what political commentators say will happen, but what is documented, underway, and technically progressing — is the starting point for any informed EM investment thesis.

mBridge

Project mBridge is the most technically advanced of the new settlement infrastructure. It is a multi-CBDC (central bank digital currency) cross-border payment platform developed by the BIS Innovation Hub in collaboration with the central banks of China (PBoC), Hong Kong (HKMA), Thailand (BOT), and UAE (CBUAE).

The mechanics: participating countries mint their own sovereign digital currencies, which can be exchanged peer-to-peer on the mBridge platform without routing through correspondent banking networks. A Thai exporter selling to a Chinese buyer settles in digital baht and digital yuan directly — the transaction clears in seconds, not days, at cost approaching zero.

As of May 2026, mBridge has completed multiple pilot transactions involving real commercial transactions. The platform has not achieved full operational scale, and Saudi Arabia — which joined as an observer in 2024 — has not yet committed to full participation. The technical architecture is functional; the political consensus on universal adoption is not yet reached.

BRICS Pay

BRICS Pay is a consumer-level payment messaging system proposed at the 2024 Kazan summit. Think of it as a conceptual WhatsApp Pay equivalent that would allow citizens of BRICS+ countries to transact with each other without touching Western payment rails.

Critical reality check: as of publication, BRICS Pay is a concept-level proposal, not an operating system. There is no live product, no unified technical standard agreed upon, and no timeline for launch. Analysts at Chatham House and the Geoeconomics Center (Atlantic Council) have both noted that building consumer-level payment infrastructure across nations with incompatible regulatory frameworks and political tensions (notably India-China frictions) is a multi-decade project, not a near-term disruption.

India-Russia Bilateral Settlement in INR/RUB

This is real and operational. Following Western sanctions on Russia’s banking sector, Russia and India expanded rupee-rouble settlement for energy trade. In 2023–2024, India was paying for Russian crude oil in Indian rupees through Russia’s Sberbank and VTB correspondent accounts. The arrangement works, but has created an asymmetry: Russia has accumulated large rupee balances it cannot easily convert or spend outside India. The mechanism is functional for specific trade corridors; it is not a global settlement system.

Saudi Arabia-China CNY Oil Settlements

Partial, announced, and modest in scale. Saudi Aramco and PetroChina signed agreements in 2023 for a portion of Saudi oil exports to China to settle in Chinese yuan. The key word is “portion” — the majority of Saudi-China oil trade continues to settle in USD. The yuan-denominated settlement is real; the narrative that it represents a wholesale shift is premature.

Let’s anchor to data rather than headline claims.

Chinese Yuan (CNY/CNH) in global payments — SWIFT January 2025 data: - Yuan’s share of global SWIFT payment messages: 4.7% - US dollar share: 47.2% - Euro share: 22.6% - British pound: 7.1% - Japanese yen: 3.6%

The yuan has tripled its SWIFT share since 2020. That is material growth. But 4.7% versus the dollar’s 47.2% illustrates the gap — the yuan is the 5th most-used payment currency in the world, a genuine achievement, but still operating at roughly one-tenth of dollar volumes.

Central bank reserves (IMF COFER data, Q4 2024): - USD: 57.4% of allocated reserves - EUR: 19.7% - JPY: 5.8% - GBP: 4.9% - CNY: 2.3%

The yuan’s reserve share has grown from 1.1% in 2016 (when it entered the SDR basket) to 2.3% in 2024. Growth is real. The gap is also real.

BIS Triennial Survey 2022 (next survey 2025): USD on one side of 88% of all FX transactions globally. Network effects in FX markets are the deepest of any financial market — shifting requires not just political will but the rewiring of clearing, correspondent banking, and hedging infrastructure that took 70 years to build.

The analytical conclusion: de-dollarisation is a real, measurable trend proceeding at a measured pace. Not a collapse. Not a displacement. A rebalancing — and one with specific, investable implications.

The Kazan summit proposal for a BRICS “unit of account” caused substantial media coverage. Let’s be precise about what was actually proposed.

The proposal — advanced primarily by Russia — is for a reference basket of BRICS+ member currencies that could be used to denominate bilateral trade contracts and potentially form the basis for settlement. Think of it as BRICS+ creating their own equivalent of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) — a weighted basket of currencies used as a reference unit.

This is not a new currency. BRICS+ nations are not creating a physical or digital coin that circulates. There is no BRICS central bank proposed, no unified monetary policy implied. The unit of account is a pricing reference tool — useful for reducing USD dependency in bilateral contracts, not useful for replacing USD in liquid global markets.

As of publication, the proposal remains conceptual. India — a key BRICS member — has been publicly cautious, noting that a basket denominated in member currencies would implicitly give significant weight to the Chinese yuan, which creates political friction. The proposal’s path to implementation depends on resolving India-China bilateral tensions. That is not a short timeline.

Here is where the analysis converts to portfolio action. Irrespective of your political reading of BRICS+ geopolitics, four asset classes are directly affected by the structural shifts underway.

Play 1: EM Local Currency Bonds

As bilateral trade settles in local currencies rather than USD, the depth and liquidity of EM local bond markets increases. More trade in INR means more INR-denominated instruments. More CNY settlement means deeper offshore CNH bond markets.

The iShares J.P. Morgan EM Local Government Bond ETF (LEMB) provides diversified exposure to EM local currency bonds across Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Thailand, South Africa, and others. Current yield to maturity: approximately 6.2% (May 2026). Currency risk is the key variable — EM local currency bonds generate returns in local currency, which must be converted back to your base currency.

Play 2: Commodity-Linked Assets

BRICS+ nations produce a disproportionate share of the world’s critical commodities — oil (Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE), copper (Chile, China), iron ore (Brazil, Australia), agricultural commodities (Brazil, India). As these producers increasingly price and settle a portion of commodity trade in non-USD currencies, commodity prices develop a partial disconnect from pure dollar dynamics.

Broad commodity ETFs: iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Indexed Trust (GSG) or Invesco DB Commodity Index Tracking Fund (DBC). These provide exposure to energy, metals, and agriculture without requiring currency position-taking.

Play 3: Diversified EM Equity ETFs

The MSCI Emerging Markets Index (tracked by VWO and EEM) weights China at approximately 27%, India at 19%, Brazil at 5%, and South Africa at 3.5% — giving meaningful BRICS+ core exposure within a diversified structure.

Inline maths: $100,000 in VWO (0.08% TER = $80/year in costs) versus S&P 500 (VOO, 0.03% TER = $30/year). The cost gap is small. The diversification benefit: VWO’s 5-year correlation to the S&P 500 runs approximately 0.70 — meaningful diversification without abandoning equity return potential.

Play 4: CNH-Denominated Instruments

Offshore Chinese yuan bonds (dim sum bonds) are issued in Hong Kong in CNH (the offshore yuan, which trades separately from the onshore CNY). Yields have ranged 3–5% (2025) depending on issuer quality. Primary access route for Singapore investors: private bank relationships, as Tiger Brokers does not list dim sum bonds directly. For institutional-grade access, DBS Treasures, UOB Private Bank, or HSBC Premier provide these instruments with minimum investment thresholds typically US$50,000–200,000.

Central banks globally purchased 1,037 tonnes of gold in 2023, per World Gold Council data. This was the second-highest year on record. The buyers: People’s Bank of China (PBoC) added approximately 225 tonnes. Reserve Bank of India (RBI): 16 tonnes. National Bank of Poland (NBP): 130 tonnes.

This is a portfolio diversification decision by sovereign reserve managers. Central banks globally have been reducing single-currency exposure to maintain reserve diversification — the same logic that drives any prudent institutional portfolio. The specific trigger in 2022 was the Western decision to freeze Russian central bank reserves ($300B+ in USD and EUR assets) following the Ukraine invasion. This demonstrated that USD-denominated reserves are not unconditionally safe from political intervention.

For individual investors, the relevant implication is: gold as a portfolio insurance component, sized appropriately (5–10% of a diversified portfolio is a common institutional allocation). Not gold as a geopolitical statement. The insurance function — reducing correlation to fiat-currency-linked assets during tail-risk events — is the investable thesis.

Gold ETFs accessible from Singapore: SPDR Gold Shares (GLD, NYSE), iShares Physical Gold ETC (IGLN, London Stock Exchange, accessible via Tiger Brokers/moomoo for internationally-listed instruments).

The network effects argument deserves serious weight.

USD’s dominance in global FX, trade invoicing, and reserve accumulation is not primarily political — it is structural. The dollar is used because it is liquid (the most liquid market in the world), because hedging instruments are deep and cheap, because commodity contracts are dollar-denominated by convention, and because the US Treasury market is the world’s largest and most liquid safe-haven.

Replacing this infrastructure requires not just political will from BRICS+ governments — it requires private sector participants (exporters, importers, financial institutions) to change their invoicing, hedging, and settlement practices. Private sector actors follow incentives, not political directives. Until EM currencies offer comparable liquidity and hedging depth to the dollar, the private sector will continue defaulting to USD for anything that requires certainty.

The BIS Triennial Survey 2022 showed USD on one side of 88% of all FX trades. The next survey (2025 data, likely published late 2025) is expected to show modest reduction. But moving from 88% to, say, 80% is a decade’s worth of gradual change — not a shock event.

The investor’s actionable conclusion from the sceptic’s case: position for the trend, but size for uncertainty. EM diversification makes portfolio sense regardless of de-dollarisation pace. The de-dollarisation trend provides an additional tailwind thesis — not a guarantee.

For an investor with US$200,000 in investable capital, building a portfolio that intelligently reflects the current EM/BRICS+ landscape:

This is not a de-dollarisation bet. It is a properly diversified portfolio that acknowledges the structural shift underway and positions thoughtfully for multiple scenarios.

The infrastructure being built by BRICS+ nations — mBridge’s CBDC rails, bilateral settlement corridors, yuan internationalisation — is moving at an institutional pace. The investor who waits for confirmation is buying after the price has moved.

Tiger Brokers provides the most accessible platform from Singapore for building an EM-oriented equity ETF portfolio. VWO, EEM, VNM, LEMB, and GLD are all accessible with standard US market access. Commission costs are fractional. For the EM investor building a satellite allocation alongside a core position, Tiger’s platform handles the entire instrument set in one account.

Endowus is the right vehicle if you want managed EM exposure with institutional fund access and risk controls — particularly relevant for investors who want Dimensional Funds’ factor-tilted EM equity exposure (Dimensional Emerging Markets Core Equity Fund) rather than passive index replication. Endowus’s Core Equity portfolios include international EM exposure, with the CPF/SRS integration advantage for Singapore investors allocating retirement capital.

For the truly sophisticated investor — dim sum bonds, private credit in ASEAN, or direct CNH instruments — the conversation moves to a private bank. DBS Treasures and HSBC Premier are the Singapore-based entry points for these products.

Build an EM Portfolio with Tiger Brokers → | Invest with Endowus →

The January 2025 SWIFT data — 4.7% yuan share — will update again in July 2025 with fresh figures. The trajectory matters more than any single data point. If the yuan reaches 6–7% of SWIFT flows by 2027, it signals that private sector adoption (not just state-directed trade) is beginning. That’s the threshold where the investment thesis moves from “structural tailwind” to “confirmed trend.”

Watch the mBridge expansion roster. Each new central bank that joins the multi-CBDC platform signals another corridor where dollar settlement is being systematically bypassed. Watch the BIS Triennial Survey 2025 publication — due late 2025 — for the next reliable snapshot of actual FX market shares.

And watch India. India’s decision to deepen or reduce rupee-denominated bilateral settlement — particularly with Russia, UAE, and Saudi Arabia — is the single most consequential variable in BRICS+ monetary architecture that isn’t China. India is the swing factor. It is also the country with the most to gain from a more multipolar settlement system, and the most political reasons to move carefully.

The architecture is being built, piece by piece, transaction corridor by transaction corridor. The investors who understand exactly what is being built — and what isn’t — will position the most intelligently.