New concepts in various facial or voice recognition techniques could be demonstrated by the developers in the Fintech Innovation Hub to gather feedback from potential users and to receive regulatory guidance from supervisors at an early stage. This should help shorten the time-to-market of useful industry-wide solutions. Second, I envisage that the Fintech Innovation Hub will also benefit the HKMA. In this place, we could explore with innovators options and possibilities of using new technologies, such as Big Data Analytics and other “regtech” initiatives, to achieve our objectives  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  more effectively without creating undue risks or burden for our internal systems or databases. Fintech Supervisory Sandbox 16. Meanwhile, there is also a quite commonly-held perception that the development of Fintech in the financial services sector in Hong Kong has been slow. I do not subscribe to this view, at least insofar as the banking sector is concerned. In the past few months, banks and stored value facility operators have already launched new payment facilities built on smart phones and Near Field Communication technology. These facilities have the potential of altering fundamentally the way consumers make payments. Many banks have also reported to the HKMA their intention to roll out very soon new technology with a view to providing more secure and efficient services to customers. I mentioned earlier biometrics authentication technology involving voiceprints and fingerprints. This is indeed something that many banks are planning to roll out.
Contrary to what we saw during the debt crisis of the 1980s, the problems in Asia were not almost exclusively macroeconomic in nature; even if these countries suffered, all of them, from some deficiencies in this respect, by and large they had long track records of successful economic management. Rather, in a context dramatically changed by a major realignment between the dollar and the yen, and important differences in short-term yields, three other factors helped trigger the crisis: • •  the weakness of their public and private banking and financial structures; an unsustainable accumulation of short-term financing - particularly of interbank lending, which Alan Greenspan refers to as the Achilles’ heel of the BIS Review 43/1998  -2-  •  international financial system - which made countries particularly vulnerable to a sudden shift in market sentiment. and, last but not least, deep-seated problems of governance, corruption, and what US commentators call “crony capitalism”. Together with the macroeconomic problems, these three major factors had to be addressed for our response to the crisis to be pertinent. If you examine our programs with Thailand, Korea, and Indonesia, you will see that we have tried to deal with these factors, and they will have to be taken into consideration in the future in whatever efforts are undertaken to avoid the recurrence of crises. But even that will not suffice.