São Paulo — Standing on the planned site of the Barra Funda Hub, only survey stakes and traces of shallow foundation works are visible for now. By 2032, this location will host the starting point of Brazil’s fastest and most modern inter-city railway: a 101-kilometre rail transit corridor linking the São Paulo, Jundiaí and Campinas metropolitan areas. The full line covers 11 cities and will benefit 15 million residents along the route.
The complete financial architecture supporting this top-tier Latin American rail transit PPP (Public-Private Partnership) project — a model for cooperation between governments and private entities to develop large-scale infrastructure projects — originated 18,000 kilometres away in Hong Kong’s offshore financial centre. The core dealmaker who orchestrated the financing structure and resolved multiple cross-border risks is Bi Wenyue, who possesses more than a decade of hands-on experience in global cross-border infrastructure project financing. Her professional solutions now serve as benchmark references for the global infrastructure investment and financing community.
Bi Wenyue currently serves as the Executive Director of Transportation & Logistic Corporate Banking Department of a leading Chinese commercial bank. With over ten years of experience specialising in cross-border project financing, she has managed transactions across multiple developing regions worldwide, including infrastructure developments in the Middle East. Her portfolio includes the São Paulo Inter-City Railway North Axis Project, which has won an internationally recognised industry award. In April 2026, at the Triple-A Sustainable Infrastructure Awards hosted by The Asset, a top-tier Asian financial publication, the project secured the Global Rail Deal of the Year award, standing out among hundreds of high-quality infrastructure projects from advanced and emerging economies across the globe. With over ten years of industry heritage, this prestigious honour is conferred by the publication’s editorial board based on in-depth industry research and quantitative data review, making it a highly credible professional distinction in global infrastructure financing circles.
A Landmark Project with International Market Influence
Attracting high-level attention from the Brazilian government and leading local enterprises, this is Latin America’s first large-scale PPP financing deal with offshore RMB drawdowns. The overall project comprises three rail transit lines: an inter-city express service, a local commuter slow line, and the upgrading and renovation of the existing Metro Line 7. New and renovated trackage totals 202 kilometres, complemented by 25 stations. Total investment stands at 23.5 billion Brazilian reals, equivalent to 4.15 billion US dollars. The three lines will be phased into commercial operation between 2029 and 2032.
For Bi Wenyue and her lead team, the core challenge lay not in the sheer investment scale, but in the project’s typical multi-faceted commercial features spanning countries, legal systems, regulatory regimes, institutions, languages and cultures. Beyond assessing commercial viability and conventional credit risks, the team needed deep insight into political and diplomatic factors, and comprehensive evaluation of country-specific risks, foreign-exchange administration concerns, sanction-related risks, anti-money-laundering compliance, reputational hazards, cross-border legal issues and local regulatory requirements. The work demanded extremely high professional competence from practitioners.
First, in-depth market research. To innovate and expand cross-border investment businesses, multi-channel research must be conducted to identify priority sectors in target markets. Drawing on information from authoritative international sources including the IMF, the three major rating agencies (S&P Global, Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service), and public service platforms operated by China’s Ministry of Commerce, the team gathered country-level and sector-specific data to pinpoint priority industries in Brazil. Priority regions were selected after evaluating Brazil’s political stability, GDP growth trajectory, business-environment friendliness and government administrative efficiency.
Second, through field visits to key clients with prior Latin-American investment experience, government competent authorities and financial industry peers, the team further mapped local industry developments and assessed the commercial viability of potential business opportunities. Broad consensus held that Brazil boasted sound fiscal policies and well-managed sovereign debt. Its infrastructure sectors, including highways, transport and rail transit, offered broad market prospects and solid commercial value. Discussions with leading local foreign-funded banks revealed diverse local financing channels and a wide array of market instruments such as bond issuances and credit facilities.
Third, once cooperative potential and target markets were identified, intensified client outreach followed. Through in-person visits and online video conferences, the team held in-depth exchanges with clients’ financing departments to build trust and convey the bank’s strong willingness to cooperate. Repeated engagements deepened the team’s understanding of local political dynamics, history and culture, economic pillars, geographical advantages and prospective collaborative projects.
An Innovative Bank-Enterprise Cooperation Model
Traditional export buyer’s credit operates on a model where enterprises identify project opportunities first before referring them to banks, which then compete on price with the lowest bidder selected. This type of product has become comparatively less appealing in recent years. For clients operating in mature financial-market environments, high insurance premiums combined with bank financing costs create substantial financial burdens. Moreover, the fixed guarantee structure lacks flexibility: clients must adapt to product rules rather than products adapting to client needs. Traditional export buyer’s credit exhibits clear limitations in meeting financing demands within mature financial contexts.
The team adopted a “go-global” strategy, engaging directly with borrowers and project sponsors to agree financing terms, sign strategic cooperation agreements and advance project implementation, thereby seizing market initiative and shifting from a follower to a trailblazer. Building on flagship projects, the bank proactively engaged clients ahead of their bidding processes to deliver market-advisory services and guide their development of Brazilian projects. Services included coordinating qualified intermediaries to conduct due diligence, engaging law firms at an early stage for legal counsel, issuing financing comfort letters, securing favourable commercial-contract terms and facilitating financing closure.
Due-Diligence Assessment
First, anti-money-laundering investigations. Given that major shareholders of Brazilian companies often consist of multiple individuals, enhanced attention was paid to customer-identity verification, anti-money-laundering checks and negative-news screening. The team performed customer-identity identification across three dimensions: verifying the controllers, beneficial owners and key transaction counterparties of local project companies; authenticating the truthfulness, completeness and validity of information on controlling parties and beneficial owners in upper-tier shareholding structures; and cross-referencing anti-money-laundering system alerts, sanction-watch-list data and negative-news reports from multiple public websites. Findings were compiled into formal documentation to underpin compliant business execution.
Second, structural design. As a PPP undertaking, the project established Project Company T through a joint venture with locally influential transport-logistics Group C. Project Company T signed a 30-year concession agreement with competent Brazilian government authorities. Adopting a Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) model, the entity is responsible for renovating the existing Metro Line 7 and constructing two new lines. The project features highly diverse sponsors, shareholders of disparate backgrounds and participating financing institutions. Emphasis was placed on underlying commercial cash flows and ESG performance.
Third, strong project competitiveness and robust financial projections. Continuous population inflow into the expanding São Paulo metropolitan area has rendered the existing Line 7 incapable of handling rising passenger volumes. Metro operating revenues stem from steady passenger flows and fare revenues. As a non-greenfield project, the asset generates fare-box revenue from its early stages, supporting long-term, stable cash-flow streams.
Fourth, lowering financing costs. Cross-border RMB financing was deployed to cut financial expenditures. To address currency-mismatch risks, the financing agreement embedded cross-currency swaps (CCS) covering the full financing tenor, paired with forward foreign-exchange settlement and sale instruments. These tools fully hedged all exchange-rate exposure between real-denominated operating cash flows and RMB principal-and-interest repayments. Brazil’s persistently high inflation exacerbates real-exchange-rate volatility, while local-currency depreciation expectations over the repayment period risk raising debt-service costs, widening project cash-flow gaps and materially impairing borrowers’ repayment capacity. CCS instruments effectively mitigated such risk exposure.
“The core logic of emerging-market project financing is never risk avoidance. It is to fully demonstrate to the market that every risk has implementable mitigation solutions. The value of a sophisticated financing framework lies in its capacity to sustain transaction stability amid shifts in external policies, exchange rates and market conditions,” Bi Wenyue observed in reviewing the project.
A Quiet Milestone for Offshore RMB Internationalisation
Beyond its sophisticated multi-layer risk-mitigation architecture, the transaction’s global award-winning status stems from its landmark industry significance: it marks the first large-scale Latin-American transport PPP project with RMB drawdown financing.
Hong Kong, the world’s largest offshore RMB hub, provided underlying liquidity support for this innovation. Denominating financing in RMB granted the project access to superior liquidity and lower financing costs compared with Brazil’s domestic credit markets. More importantly, the deal overturned entrenched market perceptions, empirically proving that the RMB is not limited to bilateral trade settlement. It can fully function as a core financing currency for large-scale cross-border infrastructure projects, with proven commercial viability and practical operability even across the 18,000-kilometre distance to Latin America.
“This transaction demonstrates that RMB-denominated project financing is no longer confined to theoretical deliberation. It possesses sound commercial feasibility and standardised implementation workflows, and its appeal continues to grow for borrowers and capital providers pursuing long-term global strategies,” Bi Wenyue stated.
Behind the Award: A Versatile Leader Advancing Cross-Border Finance
Collaborators, investment bankers and legal professionals working alongside Bi Wenyue on the project uniformly note her laser focus on practical execution and her hands-on involvement in every layer of cash-flow-model calculations. Even after her team compressed client-request response times from three working days to 24 hours, she persistently pursued further optimisations to maximise process efficiency.
Industry accolades attest to her professional influence. In 2025, she received two high-profile honours: the “Financial Industry Influential Figure” Award at the 14th China Finance Summit, and the “Pioneering Figures in Frontier Technology Innovation of the New Era” Award at the 4th World Frontier Science and Technology Conference. In terms of professional qualifications, she holds CAMS, the globally recognised Certified Anti-Money-Laundering Specialist credential, and is an individual member of the International Association of CFOs and Corporate Treasurers (China). She has independently developed multiple digital systems focused on new-energy investment management and corporate cash-flow forecasting, all of which have obtained national software copyrights and achieved commercial roll-out, supplying digital risk-control tools for the cross-border investment-and-financing sector.
Asked about the São Paulo railway project winning The Asset’s Global Rail Deal of the Year, Bi Wenyue offered measured and pragmatic remarks: “This honour is essentially industry recognition. It validates that Chinese financial institutions are fully capable of delivering integrated investment-and-financing solutions aligned with world-class standards amid complex cross-border scenarios marked by divergent institutions, currencies and markets. That constitutes the transaction’s core value.”
A Replicable Financing Paradigm Beyond a Single Project
The São Paulo Inter-City Railway is neither the first landmark cross-border deal steered by Bi Wenyue, nor will it be the last. The offshore-RMB PPP financing architecture and tiered risk-mitigation models developed for this project have become standard reference templates for multiple Chinese institutions active in infrastructure markets across Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Upon completion, the project will generate over 100,000 direct and indirect local jobs in Brazil. Commute times between Campinas and São Paulo will be cut by more than one hour, substantially easing metropolitan traffic congestion. For Chinese capital going global, the project establishes a flexibly adaptable, scalable RMB-capital-export paradigm suited for large-scale emerging-market infrastructure.
“Every cross-border transaction yields unique industry insights. The most important lesson from this project is that geographical distance and market complexity are not insurmountable barriers. Both are merely quantifiable, calculable variables. Once variables are fully unpacked and precisely identified, financial architecture enables end-to-end risk governance,” Bi Wenyue commented as she closed the project’s calculation dossiers.
Track-laying across the fields outside São Paulo will take several more years. Yet the “financial track” — breaking down barriers across currencies, countries and policies — is already fully established. This financing framework spans 18,000 kilometres of physical geography and bridges divides between disparate monetary systems, legal regimes and market trust. When the first inter-city trains speed through the three connected cities in 2032, the public will remember the railway linking the urban centres. Few, however, will know that the bridge of inter-continental cooperation was built through countless late-night refinements and multi-layered iterations of financing clauses and cash-flow forecasting models by Bi Wenyue and her team. Finance operates quietly, yet once capital channels are put in place, they deliver lasting value over time.
