2026 Main Conference Agenda

AI and digital finance have moved from demos to real use. Financial institutions are now putting these tools to work, and the questions have become practical: where is the technology delivering real value, how do we govern systems that increasingly act on their own, and how do we keep markets safe and trusted? In this headline session, Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Christopher Hui talks with three global leaders from banking, big tech and venture capital about the three forces reshaping finance. The first is data, the foundation for everything else. The second is tokenisation, from stablecoins to tokenised deposits, which is changing how money and assets move. The third is AI, which brings it all together.

Technology is fundamentally reshaping how financial services are built, delivered and secured. This session brings together senior leaders from central banks and global financial institutions to discuss how artificial intelligence, tokenisation and quantum technology are being deployed, and what it takes to maintain trust in the financial system. The discussion will also look at how central banks and the industry can work together to foster responsible innovation, strengthen resilience and build a financial architecture fit for the future.

Global commerce relies on seamless, reliable financial connectivity. This session explores how emerging technologies, from autonomous AI agents and smart contracts to Web3 rails, are revolutionizing cross-border payments, regional banking, and trade finance. Industry leaders will examine how modernizing international corridors, automating real-time compliance, and enabling programmable capital are removing friction and transforming global trade.

Money and assets are moving onto programmable rails, and Hong Kong is among the markets setting the pace, from record digital bond issuance to round-the-clock tokenized fund trading. Offchain CEO Steven Goldfeder looks at what this shift means for financial institutions: why the time to start building is now, how companies typically begin on shared public infrastructure, and when it makes sense to run infrastructure of their own, drawing on Robinhood’s path from Arbitrum to its own chain.

Amid shifting global supply chains and evolving regulatory landscapes, Chinese enterprises, founders, and affluent investors are leveraging Hong Kong as a premier launchpad for global expansion. This panel explores the latest trends in China’s going-global strategy across both corporate growth and private wealth. Speakers will share insights on balancing global ambition with local resilience, while connecting business expansion with personal wealth strategies for long-term value.

Harnessing Financial Technology: Transforming Hong Kong into a Leading Digital Payment Hub

As the global payments landscape undergoes rapid transformation, new forms of digital money and next-generation payment infrastructure are redefining the movement of value across economies. This session will launch a research publication exploring Hong Kong’s pathway to becoming a leading digital payments hub, followed by a panel discussion featuring policymakers and industry leaders on emerging opportunities, key challenges, and the strategic priorities shaping the future of payments in the digital era.

As AI reshapes every sector of the economy, the convergence of digital health, financial services and intelligent ecosystems is creating new opportunities to improve human outcomes at scale. From predictive health insights and personalised interventions to new models of financial planning and risk management, technology has the potential to fundamentally redefine how societies prepare for longer lives. This session explores how AI can help tackle some of society’s most pressing challenges, including rising healthcare costs, ageing populations and financial resilience. The discussion will examine how leaders can harness AI responsibly to create more connected, preventive and sustainable systems that support healthier, longer and more productive lives.

The promise of autonomous agents is massive, but the reality is often chaotic. Free automation still comes with five-figure monthly token bills and real security liabilities. Boards are asking what happens once an agent can move money as easily as it runs a workflow, and regulators are asking the same question. The 2026 playbook: build hard boundaries, stop token runaway, keep capital safe, and grow inside whatever rules land.

This session moves beyond basic AI chatbots to explore the next frontier of financial operations: the deployment of autonomous agents. The panel will discuss how agents capable of independent reasoning and real-time execution are reshaping the workforce. Speakers will debate the transition from human-led "Copilots" to fully autonomous financial systems that operate within set strategic parameters.

Since the launch of EnsembleTX in November 2025, banks and industry pioneers have successfully executed tokenisation transactions in real-value and driven commercialisation of tokenisation forward. These efforts have involved utilising tokenised deposits to enhance corporate treasury management and invest in tokenised money market fund. In 2026, Ant International, BlackRock, ChinaAMC(HK), HSBC, and SCB have all made notable strides towards commercialisation. We look forward to their insights regarding the benefits and challenges they have encountered in their tokenisation journey.

As AI continues to transform the financial industry, developing global AI competencies is crucial for maintaining competitive advantage, enhancing efficiency, and mitigating risks. This session will offer insights into how financial services can build sustainable AI competencies that are agile, inclusive, and aligned with evolving global standards.

AI is reshaping the strategic agenda of insurance leaders. Beyond individual applications, insurers must embed AI responsibly across their organisations through effective governance, workforce readiness and a culture of innovation. Taking a CEO-level strategic perspective, this panel will explore how senior insurance leaders are translating ambition into enterprise-wide actions, the progress made and lessons learned, and the priorities and collaborative efforts needed to scale AI responsibly.

Physical AI is transforming how machines perceive, reason, and act in the real world. From autonomous vehicles to industrial robotics, embodied intelligence is moving from lab to deployment at unprecedented speed. This session explores the technologies, world models, simulation, and edge AI, driving this revolution, the economics of scaling physical systems, and the investment frameworks needed to evaluate platforms that blur the line between software and hardware.

What does it actually take to become an AI-native institution? This session brings together the people architecting AI at the institutional level and the people building the systems underneath it, to dig into where the real friction sits: governance and explainability for systems that make consequential decisions, the gap between a working prototype and something regulators and boards will trust at scale, and what genuinely changes in how an enterprise runs once AI stops being a layer on top and becomes the substrate.

The rapid growth of digital asset ecosystems has resulted in fragmented pools of liquidity across disparate protocol standards. This panel addresses the industry-wide push for a unified taxonomy to bridge these silos, ensuring that tokenised value can move seamlessly across jurisdictions. Discussion will focus on creating a "common language" that enables real-time collateral mobility and eliminates technical or legal friction in the global market.

The embedded insurance market has evolved beyond simple API plugins into a $176 billion autonomous ecosystem. With the 2027 CMS Prior Authorization mandate looming, AI agents are now entering the entire lifecycle—from invisible underwriting at checkout to real-time, automated medical necessity reviews. This session dissects how tech giants like Tesla, Shopee, and Amazon are leveraging "The Prior Auth Stack" to remove transaction friction and examines the strategic shift for legacy carriers.

The GBA stands as one of the world’s most dynamic economic and innovation clusters, integrating Hong Kong’s global financial strengths with the tech and industrial vitality of mainland China. This session explores how cross-sector collaboration among Hong Kong’s financial institutions, technology platforms, and mainland Chinese enterprises can build a more connected, competitive innovation ecosystem for the region.

Wealth management has transitioned from static portfolios to dynamic, sentiment-aware strategies. This session explores the rise of "Active Intelligence"—systems that interpret global market shifts in real-time to execute sophisticated rebalancing and tax-optimization. We discuss how these autonomous frameworks are redefining the advisor-client relationship by moving from occasional check-ins to continuous, value-aligned wealth orchestration.

Intelligence-first strategies are now the primary engine driving institutional performance and market expansion across the globe. This panel examines how the deep integration of AI into core operations is reshaping the foundations of the financial sector and unlocking new avenues for sustainable economic growth.

Health data and insurance underwriting have always been siloed but AI is finally breaking down the walls. This session explores how leaders are navigating the complex landscape of health data sharing, interoperability standards, and AI-driven insights that bridge clinical care and insurance risk. From wearable data to electronic health records, how do you turn fragmented data into a competitive advantage while protecting patient privacy?

Digital bonds are gaining traction in Hong Kong. The HKSAR Government has already issued four successive rounds of digital green bonds, with the latest issuance reaching a record size of around HK$20 billion. Various corporates have also issued digital bonds here. By volume, over 50% of digital bonds have been issued in Hong Kong in the first half of this year. On a global scale, the use cases of digital bonds are also expanding into broader financial segments. This panel takes a look at the current digital bond landscape and the role these bonds can play in the broader digital asset ecosystem, whether it is to provide use cases for digital payments, function as underlying assets for financial instruments, or other innovative ways to support the use and integration of different technologies. Panel experts will share their observations on key global market trends, practical insights from live projects, as well as thoughts on the future landscape.

Going global has become a widely recognized pathway for enterprises’ future development. Against the backdrop of global uncertainty, where will be the next destination for companies expanding overseas?

The internet's supply of high-quality human-generated training data is running dry, and synthetic data is not a magic bullet. Enterprise-grade synthetic pipelines are becoming a genuine competitive moat for those who build them right. This session tracks the $2.25 billion synthetic pretraining data market, reveals how to manufacture the next generation of AI training data.

The banking app used to be a screen with a chatbot bolted on. That's changing fast, as AI stops sitting on top of the interface and starts running it. This session unpacks what actually shifts, in personalisation, service, and decisioning, when the channel itself becomes AI-native rather than AI-assisted.

This session will explore how tokenised money and assets, combined with agent identity, delegated authority and verifiable settlement, are making blockchain the trust and settlement layer of the agentic economy, and what it takes for financial institutions to move from tokenisation pilots to real, agent-driven flows of value.

As capital formation moves beyond traditional venture networks, AI and tokenisation may unlock new ways for investors to discover, evaluate, and participate in early-stage opportunities. This discussion examines how Token Planet could change startup funding, investor access, and the future of private asset management.

The shift from simply deploying AI to a true Intelligent Economy marks a fundamental change in how value is created, distributed, and scaled. This panel explores the opportunity and new pathways for leaders to architect business models that thrive in a high-autonomy economic landscape.

Algorithmic shifts in healthcare challenge traditional risk models as predictive analytics transforms underwriting, care management, and regulatory compliance. Machines forecast individual health trajectories, forcing insurers and policymakers to rewrite rules of access, privacy, and equity. Navigating the fragile balance between technological precision and the human right to fair, unbiased care in a data-defined future remains the central tension.

Corporate digital asset treasury strategy is entering a new phase. With even long-term corporate holders beginning to actively manage their digital asset positions, the conversation is shifting beyond pure accumulation toward liquidity, risk, and capital efficiency. This session examines the operational realities of managing digital assets as part of core corporate finance. From custody and liquidity planning to governance, disclosure, and balance sheet resilience.

SME plays a critical role in global trade, yet many still face persistent barriers in accessing efficient and affordable trade finance. Fragmented processes, repeated documentation requirements, limited data visibility and complex compliance obligations continue to create friction across the trade journey. Hong Kong is building a more connected digital trade ecosystem through HKMA’s Commercial Data Interchange (CDI), IADS, Project Cargoˣ, DPO’s CorpID and trusted trade data sharing, electronic trade documentation and closer collaboration among banks, government platforms and data providers. This panel will focus on how these building blocks can work together to reduce friction, strengthen trust, improve financing decisions and support SME growth in cross-border trade.

The panel focuses on the critical path for AI to move from technological breakthroughs to industrial collaboration. It brings together in-depth dialogue on cutting-edge robotics (brain, cerebellum, and body), world models and LLMs, the AIDC industry chain, and financial innovation. The forum will explore how embodied intelligence can move beyond R&D-intensive spending toward real-world deployment; how world models reshape cognition and decision-making; how AIDC supports computing infrastructure; and how financial capital accelerates industry-chain integration. Aimed at industry decision-makers, technology experts, and investors, it provides a cross-sector exchange platform to identify the next growth curve of the AI industry chain.

As we enter 2026, AI has moved from a "fintech add-on" to the central nervous system of the banking sector. This opening panel explores the industry-wide shift from isolated experiments to at-scale adoption. We discuss how top institutions are successfully navigating the hurdles of legacy integration and data fragmentation to drive measurable ROI and reshape the future of financial services.

With the banking sector’s quantum-preparedness baseline established, attention must now turn to what credible progress should look like over the remainder of the decade. This panel brings together regulatory leadership, academic insight and frontline banking experience to examine the practical milestones required to move from readiness planning to implementation. The speakers will discuss how a PQC Transition Toolkit tailored to the banking sector can provide a common yet flexible foundation for action – helping banks set priorities, sequence implementation and track tangible progress at a pace proportionate to their circumstances.

Hong Kong is developing as an international gold trading centre, backed by the 15th Five-Year Plan and Hong Kong's first five-year plan, which uses gold as the entry point for a commodities trading ecosystem. This session will discuss how tokenised deposits support gold trading settlement, for a growing trading hub to keep pace and competitive.

Tokenisation has the potential to reshape how financial assets are issued, distributed, settled and serviced, but meaningful adoption depends on more than technology alone. This panel brings together leaders from issuers, infrastructure providers and the digital asset ecosystem to explore tokenised products gaining market traction, operational efficiencies being realised today, and the foundations needed for secure and responsible scaling. The discussion will also examine how Hong Kong can strengthen its role as a global tokenisation hub through collaboration, interoperability and practical experimentation.

The transition from assistive AI to transactional authority is redefining core financial infrastructure. This session evaluates the architectural shift required to support self-managing systems, from capital allocation and balance sheet optimisation at banks to resilience and operational efficiency at the market infrastructure level. The panel discusses the strategic value of becoming an "AI-native" institution and the systemic challenges of maintaining stability in a high-velocity, automated environment.

The era of expensive AI is ending, and the economic fallout is rapidly separating the winners from the obsolete. As inference costs collapse, the advantage is shifting from model builders to application scale-ups. This panel decodes the new economics of AI: how cheap compute is destroying infrastructure margins, accelerating Big Tech acquisitions, and rewriting the blueprint for which startups actually capture the trillion-dollar alpha.

AI and tokenisation are changing how assets are managed, how capital moves and how markets work. In this session, we'll look at where these two trends meet, from tokenised funds and real-world assets to AI in portfolio management. We'll also look at what they mean for investors and why Hong Kong, with its deep wealth market and fintech advancement, is becoming a key place to test and grow these ideas for global markets.

The 15th Five-Year Plan officially categorizes quantum technology as a "future industry," unlocking unprecedented state-led venture capital and infrastructure mandates. This panel will explore the quantum landscape in Mainland China and how the government's "future industry" designation is facilitating the transition from papers to products.

Digital banking is moving beyond a simple interface to become a comprehensive, AI-driven financial ecosystem. This session explores how institutions are leveraging cloud-native architecture and real-time data to transition from passive service providers to active financial partners. We discuss the strategy behind building high-scale digital platforms that deliver hyper-personalized insights, seamless integration, and the speed required to meet the expectations of a tech-native market.

Against the backdrop of surging global capital seeking high-growth opportunities, Hong Kong has reaffirmed its role as a premier gateway connecting international investors to Asia’s dynamic innovation ecosystem and emerging tech-driven enterprises. As liquidity floods into the region, market participants face critical questions: Which tech sectors and cutting-edge themes will attract the most capital?

Increasing longevity, evolving customer needs and advances in AI are challenging traditional assumptions about risk and protection. As protection becomes more personalised and preventative, insurers and distributors must rethink how products are designed, distributed and delivered. This session explores the role of AI, embedded insurance and ecosystem partnerships in making protection more relevant, accessible and affordable in a changing world.

Stablecoins are evolving into invisible backend infrastructure, serving as the essential settlement layer for the rapid rise of agentic finance. This session focuses on the "Stablecoin-as-a-Service" model, exploring how autonomous AI agents, neobanks, and corporate treasuries utilize on-chain rails for frictionless transaction settlement. We will debate how industries are bridging the gap between complex crypto operations and the seamless, multi-asset interfaces that define the next generation of global commerce.

What drives real adoption across borders? Is the future built on massive compute, fine-tuned domain models, or localized compliance? Bringing together leaders across enterprise AI workflows, specialized banking models, and digital asset infrastructure, this panel explores the practical realities of scaling cross-border. Panelists discuss navigating regional rules, securing AI execution layers, and deploying models that balance speed with compliance.

The next evolution of corporate banking lies in the seamless integration of financial services directly into the global supply chain. This panel explores how AI and API-driven architectures are revolutionizing cross-border payments and trade finance. We discuss the shift toward real-time B2B ecosystems and how tech-forward institutions are removing the traditional hurdles of currency volatility and fragmented regulatory landscapes to enable truly borderless, high-velocity commerce.

The future of city mobility is not just about the vehicles we drive, but the intelligence that guides them. By examining China’s rapid-scale deployments alongside global technological breakthroughs, this panel aims to map the roadmap for the next decade of urban transportation.

Health insurers are becoming health outcomes managers. This session breaks down the $520B+ market where institutional giants are acquiring nutraceutical and diagnostic leaders to build a full-stack preventive infrastructure. Discover how the business model is evolving from reactive claims to proactive 'readiness' monitoring, and why tech giants and emerging startups are now the critical partners for insurers in a world where data is the new deductible.

Real-world assets are becoming central to on-chain capital efficiency, with sRWAs playing an increasingly critical role anchoring traditional financial instruments and the blockchain. This session will discuss how the wide range of tokenised commodities and derivatives provide global investors with easier access to high-value markets that were previously restricted by geography or capital requirements, as well as regulatory implications in different regions.