Hong Kong green fintech players must extend ties to sectors beyond finance to serve the economy, experts say

Companies must figure out how to integrate with many different sectors to prove their worth to the city’s economy, summit speakers say
The city is home to around 1,000 fintech companies, a number that grew by 25 per cent in 2023, government official says

Business of climate change

Salina Li

Published: 9:03pm, 27 Feb 2024

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Players in Hong Kong’s green fintech space should focus on increasing their integration with multiple sectors to enhance their ability to serve the real economy, industry experts said at a summit.

Green fintech is “not as narrow as it looks”, Jason Tu, founder and CEO of MioTech, a Hong Kong-based provider of sustainability data and solutions, said during the Hong Kong Green Fintech Summit on Tuesday.

While green fintech companies focus on providing technology that supports analysis and reporting on environment, social and governance issues and related subjects, “it’s not only about finance, or asset management”, he said during a panel discussion. “It has a much broader scope. Because finance is the first sector that needs to adopt sustainability, it will eventually push all these requirements onto the real economy.”

For green technologies to thrive in Hong Kong, green fintech players must look beyond the financial sector and the compliance market, and figure out how to integrate with many different sectors, said Rocky Tung, director and head of policy research for the Financial Services Development Council.

Joseph Chan Ho-lim, under secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, photographed in Admiralty on January 5, 2024. Photo: Xiaomei Chen

“This is where the opportunities are,” he said.

The city is home to around 1,000 fintech companies, a number that grew by 25 per cent in 2023, Joseph Chan Ho-lim, the under secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, said at the opening of the summit.

“To better integrate fintech with green finance and actively expand the green fintech ecosystem, we will launch a dedicated proof-of-concept subsidy scheme for green fintech in the first half of this year,” Chan said, referring to an earlier pledge. The scheme will “offer early-stage funding support for pre-commercial green fintech initiatives”, he added.

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Hong Kong, a city with ambitions of becoming a hub for green technology and environmental finance, is pushing ahead with its efforts to deliver products and solutions to domestic and international markets, as demand grows exponentially.

The Green Fintech Summit is one of a series of sustainability-themed discussions, exhibitions and events taking place during Hong Kong Green Week, which began on Monday and is expected to attract some 5,000 attendees from dozens of jurisdictions.

A prototype of the Hong Kong Green FinTech Map, which outlines the city’s current landscape of green fintech companies and their services, will be unveiled on March 1.

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Hong Kong is already one of the world’s biggest green finance hubs. It has become the largest centre for arranging green and sustainable bond issuance in Asia, Chan said.

In 2022, the total amount of green and sustainable bonds issued in Hong Kong topped the region, accounting for 35 per cent of the Asian market. Including both bonds and loans, the total amount of green and sustainable debt issued in Hong Kong in 2022 increased more than 40 per cent year on year to US$80.5 billion.

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