Speeches 31 Oct 2022  Opening Keynote at the Hong Kong FinTech Week 2022 Eddie Yue, Chief Executive, Hong Kong Monetary Authority Innovation in action - looking back to look forward Introduction 1. Good morning, everyone. A very warm welcome to Hong Kong FinTech Week. 2. This is an exciting week for Hong Kong. For the first time in three years, we are welcoming many of our overseas friends to Hong Kong again for this Fintech Week and also the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit and Rugby Sevens after that. This marks the beginning of our path back to normality, and all visitors can see and feel the vibrancy and dynamism of our city. 3. Part of this dynamism comes from the fast-growing fintech ecosystem in Hong Kong. Innovative fintech firms are exploring ways to drive the momentum towards an even more tech-enabled financial industry. Many are looking at how to make use of the fastevolving blockchain protocols to create products or services through crypto, stablecoins, NFTs, DeFi and the metaverse. 4. Some financial institutions are already using elements of the metaverse for brandbuilding and customer education; and it will be fascinating to see whether and to what extent the metaverse can form a new landscape for real-world financial activities one day. I hope the opening you just saw illustrates how the metaverse can mirror – and even improve on – reality. For example, my avatar definitely looks cooler, and is obviously a much better table tennis player than the real me. Looking Back 5.
And to help us navigate this long, winding and foggy road, we should take a pause and look back, and ask ourselves what we did well, what we could have done better, and how to do things better in the future. 10. Today I would like to take this opportunity to share three reflections with you. I won’t pretend that these are in any way definitive. But these, I believe, are the key takeaways from our experience so far. Radical Open-Mindedness 11. The first reflection is the need for radical open-mindedness, a term that I borrow from Ray Dalio, who used it to describe idea generation in investments. I would say this is even more applicable to fintech innovation – we need to be radically open to new ideas and try things that could make the financial system better. 12. When we brainstorm ideas for new fintech projects, we usually won’t know where they will lead us. The only sure thing is that if you don’t try, you never get anywhere. The key is to learn from failure and move on. This mindset has gotten us the hugely popular FPS, eight virtual banks and a vastly more advanced data-sharing infrastructure in our financial system. 13. In the beginning we were sometimes a bit resistant, wondering how new creatures like crypto, stablecoins, DeFi and other blockchain-based innovations can fit into “mainstream finance”.