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The Silk Road and Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) – the two key tenets of China’s international economic plan – will force international banks to be more flexible and collaborative.

At a roundtable discussion at Sibos in Singapore, JP Morgan executives admitted that the ventures combined had the potential to redraw the rules of how certain trade is financed, with Beijing set to take the lead on projects and infrastructure financing.

As one of the world’s premier dollar clearing institutions, the bank admits that the AIIB and Silk Road – officially referred to as the One Belt One Road programme – could lead to further efforts to internationalise the renminbi, but officials are confident that they will also spawn a host of dollar-denominated initiatives along the maritime and land routes on which the projects will be based.

“The Chinese government has injected US$63bn into the three main policy banks, but there will be places in which the Chinese banks will not have a presence,” said the bank’s head of Asia Pacific global trade and loan products, Agatha Lee.

The implication was that JP Morgan and other international banks would act in collaboration with state-owned and commercial Chinese banks, but that there may also be opportunities for them to be involved in directly financing some of the projects to emerge, given the sheer scale of the investment required.

Lee said that the sheer ambition of the initiative meant that the Chinese state-owned enterprises and banks would have to look beyond their traditional comfort zones of the domestic market and Chinese neighbouring countries, further internationalising the chance for collaboration.

“Bank officials refused to comment on what TPP might specifically mean for its own regulatory position.”

The bank refused to confirm whether it had been involved in any of the initial projects to have kicked off Beijing’s international spending splurge, but officials said they were in discussions with their client base – particularly large infrastructure companies – about where they may be able to become involved.

Michael Quinn, the bank’s head of global trade and loan products in New York, said that it expected to be involved in projects involving power generation and heavy equipment, an area it has heavily banked, traditionally.

However, when quizzed on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), signed last week in Atlanta, Georgia, the bank’s executive claimed to have no knowledge of the specific implications for the financial services sector, particularly in the area of regulatory harmonisation.

Listed among the US government’s negotiating objectives for TPP is “commitments to liberalise foreign financial services and insurance markets while protecting a government’s broad flexibility to regulate, including in the financial sector, and to take the actions necessary to ensure the stability and integrity of a financial system”.

While broadly supporting the agreement, bank officials refused to comment on what it might specifically mean for its own regulatory position. The financial services sector has lobbied strongly for harmonisation on the global rules of finance, while opponents of the TPP have claimed that it will restrict governments’ ability to legislate on a national basis, ruling out potential moves such as a financial transactions tax or a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act, which was phased out in 1992 after almost 60 years of ringfencing commercial banking and investment banking operations.