Arya News - With HSBC launching an AI institute and Hong Kong advancing tokenised gold and carbon trading, the city is doubling down on its fintech future.
HONG KONG – Financial industry practitioners are advocating a regulatory framework for data sharing, the use of agentic artificial intelligence, and tokenization, measures that would position Hong Kong as a global innovation testbed and drive significant economic growth through AI applications.
Panelists made the remarks at Hong Kong Fintech Week x StartmeupHK 2026 on Monday. The five-day event, which includes a two-day main conference, brings together around 1,000 governmental leaders and professionals from over 100 economies, including some 800 exhibitors and startups and more than 30 delegations from the Chinese mainland and abroad.
“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,” Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said in his opening remarks. “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 a forum discussing the convergence of data, tokens and AI, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu said that the SAR government will consult this year on a legal framework to enable the early detection and removal of deepfake advertisements, ensuring investors are not misled.
He added that generative AI sandbox testing had expanded beyond the banking industry to the securities and insurance sectors. He emphasized the need to extend coverage across different areas of the financial industry, including the Mandatory Provident Fund.
Hui also said Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing is preparing to launch a multi-asset tokenization platform, which will allow pilot trading in carbon credits this year, and trading in warehouse receipts for the London Metal Exchange’s Hong Kong warehouse.
“The government will also undertake an interbank tokenization project for gold transactions very soon, with a gold token representing a standard 400-ounce (12.4-kilogram) 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,” Hui added.
HSBC Group CEO Georges Elhedery announced that the bank plans to set up its AI and Emerging Technology Institute in the Northern Metropolis, which is expected to be operational in the first quarter of next year.
“We are going to have the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as the anchor 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,” Elhedery added.
Annabelle Yu, BAI Capital’s founding and managing partner, said, “I would say it is urgent (for Hong Kong) to introduce a legally certain, commercially viable, and technology-compatible data-sharing framework to encourage data exchange, at least in the beginning, across the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.”
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.
Agentic AI can autonomously determine and execute multi-step goals with limited human intervention. A survey by the Securities and Futures Commission this summer found that 30 percent of large financial firms surveyed in Hong Kong already use agentic AI in their business operations.
Forest Lin, head of Tencent Financial Technology and corporate vice-president of Tencent, said he expects Hong Kong’s regulatory framework for agentic AI to address the blurring of boundaries between financial institutions and users. Key requirements include clear registration, authorization, audit trails and liability protocols.
Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, head of the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, 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.”
His team is also examining how tokenization can improve monetary policy operations for central banks, and enable them to structure new liquidity lines more quickly, especially in times of volatility.
Denis Beau, first deputy governor of the Banque de France, said that the French central bank aims to complete the end-to-end tokenization of the commercial paper market segment with Euroclear by the end of this year. Euroclear is a Belgium-based financial market infrastructure group specializing in the central securities depository segment.