Banks are now able to reach out and deliver more financial services with good user experience to a wider spectrum of customers via mobile phones and other online channels. 5.Secondly, if we take a closer look at the tech community’s involvement, it is not difficult to see that many of the initiatives I just mentioned are the result of collaboration between the banking industry and the tech community. Since the upgrade of our Supervisory Sandbox last November, 1/4  BIS central bankers' speeches  tech firms have directly accessed the Sandbox’s Chatroom in more than 110 cases to seek the HKMA’s early regulatory feedback on their projects and ideas. This means they are better prepared to collaborate with banks to launch fintech products and services. These uses of the Chatroom are on top of around 50 cases used by banks. The rollout of the Open API Framework, and the phase one implementation roadmaps submitted by banks to the HKMA, show there will be an even higher level of integration and collaboration between the banking industry and the tech community. 6.Thirdly, more than 70 firms, including local and overseas technology and financial firms, have expressed interest in establishing virtual banks in Hong Kong. As of 31 August, we have received about 30 applications to operate a virtual bank. Some of those applications are already “substantially complete”, so we would include them in the first batch of applications for processing.
At the same time, we will also explore data analytics tools for processing the data collected in order to generate useful analyses for furthering our capability to understand and assess the ML/TF risks at the sectoral level, as well as to provide feedback to individual regulatees where appropriate. These will hopefully lead to an evolution and re-shaping of regulatory interface between the HKMA and market practitioners to enhance AML/CFT surveillance capability of all. Regtech for prudential risk management and compliance 23.Another area of focus is on Regtech for prudential risk management and compliance. The often-analytical nature of prudential risk management has created room for technology to im  4/4  BIS central bankers' speeches