Financial industry practitioners suggest Hong Kong should establish a regulatory framework for data sharing, the application of agentic artificial intelligence, and tokenization, as well as leverage Hong Kong’s role as a global innovation testbed that can drive significant economic growth through AI application.
Panelists were speaking at the Hong Kong Fintech Week x StartmeupHK 2026 on Monday. The two-day event gathers some 1,000 governmental leaders, and fintech, finance and technology professionals from over 100 countries and economies, including some 800 exhibitors and startups, and more than 30 delegations from the Chinese mainland and abroad.
In delivering his opening remarks, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said: “Despite the wide-ranging uncertainties facing the global economy, I am confident that business, finance and technology will blend to shape Hong Kong’s future. More than access to capital, businesses today are looking for open and progressive financial centers — cities where they can connect with talent, test ideas, build partnerships and compete globally.”
At the discussion forum regarding the convergence of data, tokens and AI, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu said: “The government is consulting the market very soon this year to see how we can put together a legal framework to ensure there will be early detection and elimination of deepfake advertisements, ensuring investors ae not being misled.”
He added that the generative AI sandbox testing has been expanded from the banking industry to the securities and insurance sectors, emphasizing the need to ensure coverage across different areas of the financial industry, including the Mandatory Provident Fund.
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Hui also mentioned that the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong is preparing to launch a multi-asset tokenization platform to allow pilot trading in carbon credits this year, and the trading of warehouse receipts for the Hong Kong warehouse of the London Metal Exchange.
“The government will also undertake an interbank tokenization project for gold transactions very soon, with a gold token representing a standard 400 ounce gold bar, and the pricing of the gold token will be based on the Hong Kong Gold HAU — the city’s own gold reference price,” the financial services chief added.
HSBC Group CEO Georges Elhedery announced at the forum that the global banking titan plans to set up its AI and Emerging Technology Institute in the Northern Metropolis area, which will be operational in the first quarter of next year.
“We are going to have the University of Science and Technology as the anchored academic partner; the partnership will match the university’s skills and the bank’s domain expertise in financial services to work on solutions that make the lives of our clients much easier in the age of AI and other emerging technologies,” the CEO added.
“I would say it is urgent (for Hong Kong) to introduce a legally certain, commercially viable, and technology-compatible data-sharing framework to encourage the data exchange, at least in the beginning, across the Guangdong-Hong Kong- Macao Greater Bay Area. If we do not have that validation cross-sector, cross-institution and cross-region, there will be no future,” BAI Capital’s founding and managing partner Annabelle Yu said.
Standard Chartered Group Chief Executive Bill Winters emphasized the need for a trusted regulatory framework for agentic AI that ensures interoperability across different market standards.
Forest Lin, head of Tencent Financial Technology and corporate vice-president of Tencent, said Hong Kong should propose a regulatory framework for agentic AI that can address the blurring boundaries between financial institutions and users. Key requirements include clear registration, authorization, audit trails and liability protocols.
Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, head of the BIS Innovation Hub at the Bank for International Settlements, said that deposit tokenization can offer several benefits: “We are looking at tokenization in the area of cross-border payment, and whether central banks that tokenize their reserves could actually expedite wholesale cross-border payments.”
“We are looking at how tokenization can help central banks improve their monetary policy operations, and whether tokenization can give central banks the ability to structure new liquidity lines in much shorter time periods, which is helpful in times of volatility,” he added.
Denis Beau, first deputy governor at Banque de France, said that the French central bank is targeting the completion of the end-to-end tokenization of the commercial paper market segment with Euroclear by the end of this year. Euroclear is the financial market infrastructure group based in Belgium specializing in the central securities depository segment.
