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Financial and Monetary Affairs
Belt and Road Insurance Exchange Facilitation
The IA's Belt and Road Insurance Exchange Facilitation, launched in 2018, aims to help Belt and Road project owners and investors map out their risk management needs and identify solutions, to promote intelligence exchange on risk management, and to forge alliances. Forty- one insurers, reinsurers, captive insurers, insurance brokers, industry associations and law firms had joined as members by 31 December 2020.
Financial Technology
With the joint efforts of the government, financial regulators and industry players, the local financial technology (fintech) ecology is increasingly vibrant. Some 600 fintech companies and start-ups are operating in Hong Kong, including globally renowned innovation laboratories and accelerator programmes.
In November, Invest Hong Kong organised the fifth Hong Kong Fintech Week as a virtual event, attracting over 1.2 million viewers from over 130 economies, and resulting in over 18,000 business contacts.
HKMA Fintech Initiatives
The HKMA facilitates the banking sector's development and adoption of the Open Application Programming Interface (Open API) according to the four-phase approach of the Open API Framework. Banks have launched the first two phases (product information and customer acquisition) of Open APIs, providing various innovative services to improve customer experience. The HKMA is studying implementation of the next two phases (account information and transactions).
On trade finance, the first phase of a proof-of-concept study, and a pilot run, of connecting eTradeConnect12 with the PBOC Trade Finance Platform was completed in 2020. The initiative would help provide importers and exporters with more convenient trade finance services.
The HKMA and the Bank of Thailand continued their joint research project, Project Inthanon- LionRock, to study the application of central bank digital currency to cross-border payments.
The HKMA initiated a proof-of-concept study in collaboration with banks to study the technical feasibility of building the Commercial Data Interchange, a consent-based financial infrastructure that would enable more secure and efficient data flow between banks and sources of commercial data.
In November, the HKMA and the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute published a white paper on the findings of a study of the use of artificial intelligence in small and medium enterprises loan applications.
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eTradeConnect is a blockchain-based trade finance platform launched under the HKMA's facilitation and fully funded by a consortium of 12 major banks in Hong Kong.
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