Hong Kong remains one of the world’s foremost international financial centres, with assets under management reaching HK$35.1 trillion as at end‑2024 and a long‑established reputation as a premier global IPO venue. Yet the competitive landscape is shifting rapidly. Other global financial hubs are accelerating their own market‑development agendas, digitalisation is transforming the mechanics of capital formation, and a growing cohort of pre‑profit, innovation‑driven companies is redefining the profile of global issuers. To sustain leadership, Hong Kong’s capital markets must diversify, deepen, and adapt to the demands of a more complex, technology‑enabled, and cross‑border investment environment.

The city enters this next phase from a position of strength. Its Connect schemes have created an unparalleled two-way bridge between Chinese Mainland and global investors. Market infrastructure—such as the CMU—meets world-class standards. The legal and regulatory framework is trusted, predictable, and internationally aligned. And Hong Kong’s professional services ecosystem offers deep expertise across banking, asset management, law, accounting, and risk management.

Building on these foundations, this concept paper explores how Hong Kong could evolve beyond its traditional role and articulate a more ambitious identity: Asia’s indispensable global capital nexus, where Chinese and international participants originate, mobilise and recycle capital across multiple asset classes and currencies.

Realising such an ambition would involve a holistic strengthening of the market architecture. The paper therefore examines possible approaches to broadening the issuer base, deepening the investor pool, enhancing intermediary capabilities and expanding the breadth of investable products—underpinned by robust governance, transparency and risk management. The objective is to explore how Hong Kong’s markets can better support innovation-led enterprises, attract long-duration global capital, enable seamless cross-border intermediation and facilitate the adoption of next-generation financial infrastructure.

To provide structure to this exploration, the Financial Services Development Council (FSDC) sets out a time-phased, indicative roadmap of potential areas for further consideration:

• Short Term (6–24 months): Potential measures to enhance market vibrancy could include refining listing channels for pre‑profit and IP‑intensive firms (including further calibrations to regimes such as WVR, strengthening market‑making and post‑listing support, attracting re‑listings and dual primary listings of suitable issuers, and conducting controlled pilots of innovative instruments.
• Medium Term (2–5 years): Broaden and deepen the ecosystem may encompass extending Connect schemes beyond equities and bonds, developing private‑asset platforms, mobilising long‑duration capital via high‑grade fixed income, sustainable finance, tokenised real assets and scaled infrastructure and project‑finance opportunities, and deploying blockchain‑enabled “digital plumbing” to support more efficient cross‑border workflows.
• Long Term (5–10 years): Cement Hong Kong’s role as a global standard‑setter through scaled tokenisation‑enabled issuance and post‑trade capabilities, further development of offshore RMB markets and the wider debt capital market, and full evolution into a multi‑asset, multi‑currency capital formation hub for the region.

By continuing to explore and advance these directions in an orderly manner, Hong Kong would be better positioned to enhance its competitiveness, support real‑economy growth and innovation, and further reinforce its role as a key pillar of the global financial system in the digital era.