The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) co-organised Hong Kong FinTech Week 2026 with Invest Hong Kong and launched Project SAGE there, short for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement. The project is meant to support the industry's exploration of agentic finance applications while a governance framework is built alongside them, and the HKMA has set up a cross-sectoral Agentic Finance Expert Group to support it.
The regulator also published a discussion paper on the use of agentic AI by banks, seeking industry feedback on the supervisory considerations for governing such applications. According to The Standard, the paper asks how banks should govern AI agents and assign responsibility for them, including the options of a central register of trusted agents or an industry-wide "know your agent" standard.
QUANTUM, TOKENS AND PAYMENTS
Alongside the AI work, the HKMA and The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, with support from industry participants, launched a PQC Toolkit to support the banking sector's transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). HKMA chief executive Eddie Yue warned that quantum computing could arrive within three to 15 years and could rapidly break existing cryptography, and said banks need several years to prepare, The Standard reported.
On tokenisation, the HKMA said it has advanced Ensemble TX to a new stage that enables 24/7 real-value transactions. It has also completed trial trades in which Recognised Dealers traded tokenised Exchange Fund Bills in the secondary market, which it said enables them to enhance efficiency in secondary and repo trading, and it will soon expand the trials to include regulated stablecoins.
With Cyberport, the authority launched tConnect Launchpad to bring together financial institutions, technology firms and digital asset innovators. On payments, the Faster Payment System (FPS) will link with UnionPay International by the end of this year, progressively letting users pay by scanning QR codes at more than 100 million merchants under UnionPay and its partner networks in Hong Kong, the Chinese Mainland and more than 40 overseas markets.
ONE YEAR INTO FINTECH 2030
The package builds on "Fintech 2030", the strategy the HKMA unveiled at the previous FinTech Week on 3 November 2025. That plan set out more than 40 initiatives under four pillars known as DART: Data and Payment, Artificial Intelligence, Resilience and Tokenisation.
Last year's plan promised a Project Ensemble pilot for real-value transactions and work to drive industry readiness for post-quantum cryptography. This year the HKMA said it has advanced Ensemble TX to a new stage and launched the PQC Toolkit. Yue stressed that innovation must go hand in hand with risk management, and noted that the strategy has seen much progress in a single year, with four years remaining, according to The Standard.
"Building on the good progress that we have made under ‘Fintech 2030’, banks and fintech firms can better harness data, A.I., tokenisation and other emerging technologies," Yue said. He also moderated a panel with Denis Beau, First Deputy Governor of Banque de France, Tommaso Mancini-Griffoli, Head of Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub, and Georges Elhedery, Group CEO of HSBC. The HKMA did not disclose funding amounts or quantitative adoption targets for the new initiatives, Blockchain.News noted.
THE TGB VIEW
Hong Kong is an international banking centre whose authorised institutions held HK$33.4tn of assets at end-July 2026, roughly ten times GDP, and in August 2026 115 of its 147 licensed banks were incorporated outside Hong Kong, according to the TGB market profile. So the HKMA's paper on banks' use of agentic AI speaks mainly to foreign-incorporated lenders, and 24/7 real-value transactions on Ensemble TX serve a system where 58% of deposits are denominated in foreign currencies. The next dated step is the FPS link with UnionPay International, due by the end of this year.
Related: Hong Kong Monetary Authority raises base rate 25 basis points to 4.25%
Bank news that matters, every weekday.
Follow The Global Banker on LinkedIn