Frontline | Deng Guobiao of XTransfer: Small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises are seeking opportunities from the supporting links of emerging industries

Text | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

On August 12, XTransfer held the 2026 Future Foreign Trade Conference. Relevant personnel from foreign trade enterprises, banks and financial institutions attended the meeting to discuss the changes in this year's foreign trade market and the new opportunities faced by enterprises going global.

In the past few years, factors such as geopolitical conflicts and fluctuations in sea freight have continued to affect global trade. A customer survey disclosed by XTransfer at the conference shows that the exports of small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises on its platform have maintained certain resilience this year, the payment collection status of enterprises has improved, and the bargaining power of some enterprises in overseas markets is also increasing.

Deng Guobiao, Founder and CEO of XTransfer, believes that compared with large enterprises, small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises have greater flexibility in market changes, and can quickly adjust their market layout according to changes in orders and demands.

The changes are also reflected in the structure of export products.

According to relevant data from the General Administration of Customs of China, emerging industries represented by artificial intelligence, robots, and innovative drugs are becoming new growth drivers for China's foreign trade.

Deng Guobiao observed that small and medium-sized enterprises do not necessarily directly participate in core links such as complete robot machines and large models, but more often start from the supporting parts of the industrial chain, such as fields including robot racks, AI server heat dissipation parts, and medical consumables packaging.

This is one aspect of the changes in China's foreign trade structure in recent years. In the past, small and medium-sized export enterprises were mostly concentrated in traditional categories such as clothing, furniture, and consumer electronics; as China's manufacturing industry extends to new industries such as robots and AI hardware, some supply chain enterprises have also begun to look for overseas orders along with their downstream customers.

The demands of small and medium-sized enterprises for cross-border transactions are also changing. As enterprises enter more non-European and non-American markets, local collection, RMB settlement, and compliance review in different countries and regions have become problems that cross-border payment enterprises need to solve.

Founded in 2017, XTransfer currently mainly provides B2B cross-border payment collection and related risk control services for small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises. According to the data disclosed by the company, it has served more than 1 million enterprise customers in total, and its local collection accounts currently cover nearly 60 countries and regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand. Overseas buyers can pay in local currency, while domestic export enterprises can complete foreign exchange settlement through the platform.

AI has also begun to be applied in the risk control link of cross-border payment.

XTransfer currently applies the AI model TradePilot to processes such as customer onboarding, transaction authenticity verification and anti-money laundering. The company disclosed that 72 AI agents have been embedded in relevant review processes. Compared with generating content, the main function of this type of AI is to process a large amount of transaction and enterprise information to assist in judging transaction risks and compliance.

For cross-border payment companies, the expansion of the global footprint of small and medium-sized enterprises also means that business coverage needs to be further extended to more countries and regions; for small and medium-sized foreign trade enterprises, under the circumstance that global demand still faces uncertainties, new growth opportunities are shifting from simply looking for new markets to further entering new industrial chains and product categories.