The Zhitong Finance App learned that APEC adopted the “one meeting, two places” Shenzhen-Hong Kong collaboration model this year, and the APEC Finance Ministers Meeting settled in Hong Kong for the first time. Qiu Dagan, a member of the Legislative Council of the Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Community and an alternate representative of the “APEC Business and Trade Advisory Council” (ABAC) in Hong Kong, China, believes that the appointment to host the Finance Ministers Meeting not only highlights the country's high level of trust and firm confidence in Hong Kong as an international financial center, but also reflects the complementary advantages of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Among them, Shenzhen has a complete ecosystem, production lines, and industrial support chain; Hong Kong has an irreplaceable foundation of talents, international connections, laws, and high added value of financial products. Through the integration of the two places, the future market capacity combining technology and finance has huge potential.
The conference focused on topics such as digital trade, digital finance, digital assets and digital infrastructure, and discussed how technology can promote economic development, reduce trade barriers, and promote mutual benefit and win-win for different economies. Qiu Dagan pointed out that at present, Hong Kong has several important advantages in the digital economy. The first is the improvement of digital infrastructure. When financial products are transferred to technology platforms for trading, infrastructure security, settlement mechanisms, technology protection, and international connectivity are all critical. With the government actively promoting key tools and platforms such as digital corporate identity (CorpID), commercial data communication (CDI), and Cargo X in recent years, Hong Kong is currently in a leading position in the development of the digital economy.
Second, Qiu Dagan believes that Hong Kong's economy has never been more than a “7 million business”. As China's external window, Hong Kong has a high degree of credibility in terms of regulations, finance and arbitration centers. Under the trend of global finance becoming fully digitized, Hong Kong's sound regulations have always been widely recognized by various economies. At the same time, Hong Kong's financial officials and institutions have maintained close ties with international organizations for a long time, and even acted as important members or representatives, to help strengthen the confidence of various economies in Hong Kong and attract other countries to move their trade processes to the Hong Kong platform and strengthen themselves as the lifeblood of the economy and international financial center Positioning.
Looking ahead, Yau Daghan said that the Hong Kong government has listed the promotion of government digitalization and the private data industry as a priority task in the Policy Address. It also includes concepts such as building an “AI urban brain” integrated urban management system, covering public and private data fields such as transportation, finance, and trade. If the application of artificial intelligence is further combined in the future, it is believed that data can be transformed into more practical content.