Key Takeaways from Hong Kong FinTech Week

Key Takeaways from Hong Kong FinTech Week

Hong Kong FinTech Week took place on the 2nd and 3rd November 2023. I was delighted to attend the in-person event. It is clear, the Hong Kong SAR government is committed to the continuing rise of Fintech and is expanding research and reach and influence in Hong Kong and beyond. This flagship event is curated with a view to enhancing the competitiveness of Hong Kong's financial services industry and the real economy, empowering financial institutions to accelerate digitalisation and product innovation.

The theme for FinTech Week is ‘FinTech Redefined’ and to explore opportunities for the FinTech sector as after a covid "parenthesis", Hong Kong is back in a good position to capitalize on its early lead.

Key Takeaways – How is Gen AI revolutionising RegTech?

The key takeaway for me was how Gen AI is revolutionising RegTech. By introducing ways to support governance and streamline regulatory compliance in real time. For example:

1.Improved Regulatory Reporting:

Handling big data and enhance accuracy, help better decision making by making more informative decisions. Scalabilities of Gen AI – can handle the amount of data and can predict the behaviours of non-compliance.

2.Automate Compliance Processes:

GenAI enables robust and efficient detection and analysis of regulatory risks. By utilizing machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques, GenAI can analyse vast amounts of regulatory data, identify patterns, and detect potential compliance issues. Gen AI can predict regulatory changes so financial institutions can prepare and respond accordingly and be at the forefront of it, rather than the backfoot.

3.Enhance Customer Due Diligence and Onboarding Journey:

Automating data collection, analysis and reporting, by analysing data upfront, it can identify and highlight potential compliance risks in real time. It can also free up resources so they can do value add work for the business.

What are the challenges faced by Hong Kong FinTechs in 2023?

The FinTech week event also provided a platform for industry leaders to discuss common and unique challenges faced by FinTech and Regtech industry, these included: 

1.Data Quality:

Fintech companies need to ensure the data their solution/solutions collect, and use is accurate, reliable, and relevant to their client’s business needs. It becomes more challenging to ensure quality data when you consider the further challenges of Data Integration. Fintech solutions often use and integrate multiple different data sources, often requiring specialized tools and expertise. A further data quality challenge for FinTech companies is in the growth in volume of data. Processing and integrating high volumes of data in real time whilst providing real time insights is becoming increasingly challenging for FinTech solutions.

2.Ethical Bias

Data integrity is not only threatened by security breaches but can also by technical aspects such as the reliability of AI and Machine Learning (ML) systems. FinTech solutions using AI and ML, may need to assess data integrity differently, especially around the issue of ethical bias. It is a major industry concern that an AI or ML system's output may affect its ethical value, as these systems may intentionally or inadvertently, systematically skew decision making and result unfair outcomes due to the reproducing and reinforcing existing societal biases such as gender and race inequality, discrimination and marginalisation.

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3.Culture to adoption of AI

Many workers worry that AI or FinTech solutions will replace their jobs. To successfully implement AI and FinTech solutions into an organisation there needs to be proactive management of culture change. This includes helping employees overcome the fear, apprehension, and anxiety they encounter when their work practices change due to integration of AI or FinTech solutions into their business operations. This involves providing comprehensive and complete training resources, fostering a culture of learning, open communication and adaptability whilst emphasizing the importance of human and AI partnership.

Adoption of FinTech and RegTech in Hong Kong

The fundamental notion was that evolving demands for FinTech must be met by leading institutions to best manage risk. The space is clearly maturing and there are many opportunities to redefine FinTech. With talent and resource to facilitate this, the adoption of FinTech’s and RegTech’s from Hong Kong and overseas companies into the Greater Bay Area, will strengthen synergies and empower new businesses to grow.

It was a great experience reconnecting with existing partners and making new connections. We are proud to see Hong Kong welcoming industry guests from all over the world and evolving into a thriving FinTech hub.

We would love to talk to you about our latest digital innovations and see how you can use our expertise to achieve your digital transformation goals. For more information reach out to us or request a demo today.