On November 3, at the Hong Kong FinTech Week, Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive John Lee stated that Hong Kong will relax its Capital Investor Entry Scheme to encourage more investors to enter the fintech sector. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is exploring the tokenization of conventional finance through the Ensemble sandbox, while applying a regulatory sandbox to foster innovation and prudent risk management.

Lee pointed out that in September this year, Hong Kong ranked third globally and first in Asia in the Global Financial Centres Index, which also rated Hong Kong as the top global city for fintech. Currently, Hong Kong is home to over 1,200 fintech companies, a 10% year-on-year increase. It is projected that by 2032, the total revenue of Hong Kong's fintech industry will exceed US$600 billion, with an annual growth rate of over 28%.

People's Bank of China Deputy Governor Lu Lei stated at the forum that technology-driven financial innovation has become a crucial driver for transforming financial development methods and governance systems in the context of the digital economy. The PBOC places great importance on fintech initiatives, fully leveraging the dual driving forces of artificial intelligence and data elements to steadily advance financial digital transformation to a new level, providing strong support for excelling in the "Five Major Areas of Finance."

Lu Lei noted that the PBOC will continue to deepen the application of new-generation artificial intelligence technologies in finance. The PBOC highly values the financial application of new-generation AI technologies and has researched and formulated a series of policy documents on "AI + Finance." These guidelines encourage mainland financial institutions, under the premise of security and compliance, to prudently leverage large models as intelligent brains, coordinate task planning and scheduling, integrate complex financial operations, achieve effective capability integration and efficient business collaboration, and explore expanding the production possibility frontier (PPF) of finance.

Lu Lei believes that the PBOC's exploration of expanding finance's production possibility frontier aims to provide existing financial products and services at lower costs or develop entirely new financial products and services, thereby empowering financial institutions to transform and upgrade their business models.