In the era of the knowledge economy, a key question is whether knowledge innovation can effectively promote the growth of financial capital? While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the impact of patent transfers on regional innovation, there is a noticeable absence of studies investigating the association between interregional patent transfers and capital flows among regions. The paper investigates the effects of patent transfer on the capital centralities within inter-city network systems by a two-stage Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimation with instruments, considering the endogeneity of knowledge transfer. Our findings reveal that the level of patent transfer in cities is positively correlated with both agglomeration and diffusion centralities. Notably, patent transfer significantly impacts cities with smaller existing capital accumulation, whereas the diffusion centrality model shows opposite results, suggesting its role in reducing the network hierarchy and promoting convergence of regional growth in China.