Hong Kong Fintech Week 2025 opens

The five-day Hong Kong Fintech Week and StartmeupHK Festival 2025 kicked off on Monday, setting the stage for dialogues on frontier fintech trends.

This year's event, its 10th edition, featured 11 forums on such topics as health and Insurtech, digital finance and assets, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.

John Lee, chief executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), said that Hong Kong is home to more than 1,200 fintech companies, up 10 percent from last year. The fintech sector is expected to generate over 600 billion U.S. dollars in total revenue by 2032.

Regarding Hong Kong's pursuit of a vibrant fintech ecosystem, Financial Secretary of the HKSAR government Paul Chan emphasized the need to ensure real-world applicability, investor protection, and financial stability while spurring innovation in areas like digital assets and AI.

Hong Kong has implemented a range of regulatory sandboxes that allow innovators to test new products in a controlled environment, receive timely regulatory feedback, and refine their solutions before going to market. Project Ensemble spearheaded by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), for one, is exploring tokenization in conventional finance while boosting innovation under prudent risk management.

At Monday's event, the HKMA unveiled "Fintech 2030," a roadmap aimed at making Hong Kong a robust, resilient, and future-ready fintech hub. It put forth over 40 initiatives for pledges to create next-generation data and payment infrastructure, facilitate adoption of AI across the financial sector, build quantum-safe infrastructure for secured financial services as well as to accelerate tokenization of real-world assets.