Hong Kong Claims Top Fintech Ranking as Tokenised Fund AUM Crosses HK$10 Billion

Hong Kong's financial services bureau laid out a quantitative case for the city's fintech ambitions on Monday, and the numbers are now substantial enough to price.

Acting Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Joseph Chan told the Legislative Council that over 1,200 fintech and Web3 enterprises were operating in Hong Kong as of September 2025, a year-on-year increase of approximately 10 percent. The latest Global Financial Centres Index ranks Hong Kong first globally for fintech, third overall, and first in Asia-Pacific — a trifecta the government is now using as a benchmark rather than a target.

Tokenisation: From Pilot to Product

The commercial substance lies in the tokenisation figures. The Securities and Futures Commission has authorised 11 tokenised retail money market funds, one tokenised retail gold investment product, and one gold exchange-traded fund, with combined assets under management reaching approximately HK$10.8 billion by March. The SFC's "ASPIRe" roadmap, published in February 2025, provides the regulatory architecture — a framework that spells out how tokenised traditional financial products can be offered to retail investors, a clarity that few other jurisdictions have codified.

The government has been its own test case. In the fourth quarter of 2025, it issued a third tranche of tokenised green bonds — the largest issuance of its kind globally at the time — and included a tokenised central bank money settlement option. The bond programme functions as a demonstration trade: it proves that issuance, settlement, and custody can operate on distributed ledger infrastructure at scale, under Hong Kong law, with the same finality as conventional settlement.

Infrastructure and Supervision

On the payments side, the People's Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority launched a "Cross-Border Payment Link" in June 2025, enabling real-time retail payments between the two jurisdictions. For the banks and payment companies that serve the dense cross-border flow of individuals and small businesses between Hong Kong and the mainland, the link shortens settlement from hours or days to instant — a reduction that, multiplied across transaction volumes, represents a material efficiency gain.

The regulatory approach to artificial intelligence is being road-tested through sandboxes. A generative AI sandbox launched by the HKMA and Cyberport in August 2024 has been extended twice: the second phase, in October 2025, focused on "AI versus AI" — using artificial intelligence to detect and counter AI-driven risks. By March 2026, the sandbox had expanded to cover banking, securities and capital markets, asset and wealth management, insurance, mandatory provident funds, and stored-value facilities, with the SFC, Insurance Authority, and MPF Authority joining as co-sponsors.

On talent, the government reported over 870 practitioners enrolled under its fintech training subsidy scheme, and more than 120 students placed across 30 fintech firms through a Greater Bay Area internship programme now in its fifth cohort.

The broader signal from Monday's session is that Hong Kong's fintech policy is moving from framework-building to metric-tracking. The tokenised AUM figure is being disclosed. The enterprise count is being updated. The rankings are being cited. For the asset managers, banks, and technology firms deciding where to locate their tokenisation programmes or their next compliance hire, those numbers form a dataset against which Hong Kong's proposition can be compared, priced, and — increasingly — tested.