Hong Kong

Stablecoin Ordinance moved from law to live regime in under a year

The Stablecoins Ordinance took effect on 1 August 2025; HKMA received 36 applications by the 30 September deadline and granted the first two licences on 10 April 2026 to HSBC and Anchorpoint Financial (Standard Chartered + HKT + Animoca Brands JV). HSBC has flagged an H2 2026 launch for a HKD-denominated stablecoin. Hong Kong is the first G20 market with a fully operational licensed fiat-backed stablecoin regime.

e-HKD work has consolidated around wholesale; retail pilot closed October 2025

HKMA completed the e-HKD Pilot Programme in October 2025 and is prioritising e-HKD for financial-institution wholesale scenarios. Preparatory work for any future retail e-HKD will conclude in H1 2026 but no issuance commitment has been made; the immediate policy emphasis is on tokenised-deposit interoperability via Project Ensemble. The CBDC label sits at 'pilot' in the SCHEMA-v3 taxonomy.

FPS is the interbank spine; Octopus remains dominant for transit and small-ticket retail

FPS cleared ~520 million transactions in 2024 across more than 16 million registered aliases. Octopus retains 34.8m cards in circulation against a 7.5m population, dominant on transit and small-ticket retail. AlipayHK, WeChat Pay HK and PayMe sit in parallel on the FPS QR rail; the Greater Bay Area cross-boundary corridor with PromptPay (live since 2023) processed over 2 million transactions in its first year.

The April 2026 HKMA licences open commercial-bank-issued HKD stablecoins for the first time in any major financial centre. Corridor-pricing for AlipayHK-Mainland and FPS-PromptPay cross-boundary settlement is the obvious first commercial use case; PSPs that intermediate HKD-stablecoin payments-in-payments-out for SME cross-border have a 12-month window before larger banks scale their own offers.

FPS-PromptPay cleared its first 2 million transactions during 2024-25; FPS-UnionPay QuickPass and FPS-Alipay Mainland linkage are expected H2 2026. Acquirers that hold FPS access plus Mainland clearing capacity can intermediate inbound-tourist and resident-cross-border flows at scheme-fee economics roughly half the card-rail equivalent.

The 2020-vintage virtual-bank cohort (ZA, Mox, Livi, WeLab, etc.) is past its profitability inflection; Mox posted its first profitable quarter in Q3 2025 and the cohort's aggregate assets passed HK$60bn at end-2024. Consolidation pressure is mounting from larger licensed banks' digital propositions; M&A or strategic capital injection is the likely path for sub-scale licensees through 2026-27.