Following are the remarks by the Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Mr Christopher Hui, at the panel session "FinTech Nexus: Where Data, Tokens and AI Converge" of the FinTech Week x StartmeupHK Festival 2026 today (November 2):
Good morning everyone and a warm welcome to this panel of our Hong Kong FinTech Week x StartmeupHK Festival 2026. This FinTech Week is really timely. Just two weeks ago, we had the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Finance Ministers' Meeting 2026 in Hong Kong. Last week, we had Halloween, and this week we have the FinTech Week and at the same time HKMA (Hong Kong Monetary Authority)'s Global Financial Leaders' Investment Summit. In January next year, we will have the Asian Financial Forum. So it's a whole series of events.
As all of you know, Hong Kong has been ranked third in the latest Global Financial Centres Index, and we came first globally in fintech offerings. I'm sure there's a reason for that as you can see from the turnout today. We have over 45 000 participants, 1 000 speakers as well as 800 companies and exhibitors.
Before I make a further advertisement about Hong Kong, I think it's important for all of you to know that we have a very distinguished panel here today: the Group Chief Executive at Standard Chartered, Mr Bill Winters; the Founding and Managing Partner of BAI Capital, Ms Annabelle Long; and Corporate Vice President of Tencent and Head of Tencent Financial Technology Mr Forest Lin. They came here for a reason because the theme for this year's Fintech Week is about bridging the future and also bridging the world. The next question to ask is, with this objective in mind, what are the tools and instruments that we have?
Basically, there are three. One is about data as an enabler. Secondly, it's about tokenisation as the new rails, and thirdly is having AI as the new intelligence.
Insofar as the Government is concerned, we have the Commercial Data Interchange operated by the HKMA. Now, we have 28 banks and 17 data sources linked to that. I am sure those banks are all represented here today. We estimated that with this introduction, the borrowing costs of our small and medium-sized enterprises basically reduced by an average of 36 basis points as a result. These are real general economic impacts arising from infrastructure.
As I said, there are three topics to cover. The next one we will deal with is tokenisation. I am very pleased to announce that our interbank tokenised gold transaction project is going to start soon. Basically, what we are going to do is, with the HKMA's Project Ensemble, there will be a gold token representing one standard 400-ounce gold bar. At the same time, you will be using the HAU, which is Hong Kong's own gold reference price, as the pricing. To support that, apart from the tokenised gold as it is, we will also have tokenised deposits. It will be a new initiative that we will announce today.
At the same time, our Stock Exchange is going to have a blockchain-backed, multi-asset tokenisation platform to allow pilot trading of its tokenised carbon credits this year, and also include warehouse receipts from London Metal Exchange (LME)-approved warehouses in Hong Kong for a pilot next year.
For Fintech to grow, it's about infrastructure and it's also about ecosystem. Rome wasn't built in a day. What we need to do is to have the right regulatory block to ensure that this whole sector can grow sustainably. Before the end of this year, we are going to introduce to our Legislative Council a bill to regulate the advisory, dealing, custody, and also management of virtual assets.
Even though we are putting together these regulatory blocks, we have to ensure that innovation is being encouraged and also at the same time be facilitated. That's why our Cyberport, with the Government's support, will be launching the Blockchain and Digital Asset Pilot Subsidy Scheme 2.0 for applications from today to engender more innovation in that sector. In such a way that while we have this regulatory regime in place, there will eventually be more innovative digital asset solutions and applications for people and organisations to use.
Let's move to the third part of this panel. It's about AI. AI comes with its own risks and opportunities, and that's why the Government issued two years ago the Policy Statement on Responsible Application of Artificial Intelligence in the Financial Market in terms of how we see the responsible application of AI.
Our approach is dual track: actively promoting AI adoption while mitigating the risks. What we believe is that our regulators need to move the market and need to ensure that they are being kept up to speed and updated on what's going on in the markets before they can regulate them. Lately, we have expanded the GenAI Sandbox to add two more plus behind (GenA.I. Sandbox++) in such a way that we will cover not just the banking sector but also the securities sector and the insurance sector. Apart from the three key sectors, we also have to ensure that other elements of the financial sector, including the mandatory provident fund, are also being covered. This explains why we have this expanded sandbox.
Having the sandbox aside, it is also important to ensure that government regulators are kept well abreast of what's going on in the market. One of the things that we see is that there is an increasing emergence of agentic AI with a lot of fake, and also somehow fictitious, information to lure people into investment. Therefore, our Financial Services Development Council is undertaking a study to look into the potential risks of and mitigations on dealing with this emerging trend.
At the same time, the Government is consulting the public and market very soon this year to see how we can enhance the legal framework to ensure that there will be early detection and also removal of such online fraudulent content relating to financial scams, including deepfake content, to ensure that our investors are not being misled.
I must say this is a real pleasure for me to moderate this session because I can't find a more collegial panel than this one where everyone agreed on the opportunities and risks in front of us, yet at the same time so concerted in your effort to make Hong Kong your platform to take advantage of the opportunities.
We covered data, AI, and tokenisation. I'm sure that through this panel, all of you can experience for yourself what Hong Kong can offer beyond this panel.
Before I conclude, a final applause to our panelists here and a big welcome to all of you for being part of Hong Kong Fintech Week.
