(Yicai) Feb. 14 -- The Shanghai Free-Trade Zone has set up five more cross-border data service centers, in addition to the one in the Lingang Special Area, to provide one-stop services for companies that need to transfer data overseas.

The five new centers opened yesterday in the Shanghai Bonded Zone, Lujiazui Financial and Trade Zone, Jinqiao Economic and Technological Development Zone, Zhangjiang High-Tech Industrial Development Zone, and Pudong Expo Area.

The centers will offer consultation services on cross-border data policies, guide companies through the application requirements and process, review their application materials, and submit them to the cyberspace watchdog’s Shanghai office, the Shanghai statistics bureau, and the FTZ’s own management committee. Regulatory checks are expected to take 15 working days.

They will also collect feedback from enterprises to optimize their workflows and provide references for the formulation of subsequent updates to the negative list.

The initiative follows a negative list and management measures for outbound data from the FTZ that were issued by the Shanghai government earlier this month.

“The negative list is a significant milestone for the Shanghai FTZ in achieving cross-border data flows across the entire region,” Yang Haijun, chief engineer at the Shanghai branch of Cyberspace Administration, told Yicai. Regulators need to better understand the actual need for transborder data flows and serve the needs of enterprises, Yang noted.

The negative list covers three key areas: reinsurance, international shipping, and trade for the retail, catering, and accommodation sectors. It includes two categories of data -- ‘important data’ and ‘personal information’ -- and involves six specific scenarios and 84 data items.

Shanghai will continue to conduct research and surveys to understand typical cross-border data scenarios and actual needs while pushing ahead with creating a new version of the negative list that can apply to other key areas.

Set up in 2013, the Shanghai FTZ was the Chinese mainland’s first pilot free-trade zone. Covering an area of 28.8 square kilometers, the zone is an “experiment field to test policies for government reform, financial reform, business innovation, foreign investment and tax reform,” according to its website. “It also allows Shanghai to vigorously develop re-export trade and offshore businesses.”

Editor: Futura Costaglione