For decades, the city has been a regional center for global financial institutions.

In addition, overseas infrastructure projects funded by the bank will provide more business opportunities for project developers in China, Ye said.

Chen said the bank may also complement China's massive foreign exchange reserves.

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"A large share of China's $4 trillion foreign exchange reserve has been invested in US Treasury bonds, with even lower yield than the inflation rate.

Once the bank is in place, "we might as well use part of the reserve in the overseas infrastructure projects, and we may get higher returns", he said.

Harold Trinkunas, director of the Latin America Initiative at the Brookings Institution, said the new bank will give developing countries a bigger say in the international financial system.

"In a sense, the New Development Bank is another version of the World Bank, but without some of the political conditionality issues that have traditionally been attached to World Bank loans.

"In a lot of ways, the BRICS countries are all concerned with the level of influence that the West exercises in the current set of institutions that govern the international financial economic system, and they're looking to create some alternatives that diversify and give them some options," Trinkunas said.

Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the bank "can make a positive contribution to global growth".

"But it also sends a message that China and some other countries are not happy at the pace at which governance is changing at long-standing multilateral international institutions," Lardy said.