The Hong Kong Monetary Authority on Monday launched Project SAGE, a program to let banks test artificial-intelligence agents under a new governance framework, and moved its Project Ensemble tokenization platform to 24/7 real-value settlement, as Chief Executive Eddie Yue set out the next steps of the city's "Fintech 2030" plan at Hong Kong FinTech Week.

For banks, asset managers and payment firms in Asia, the package matters because it touches rules as well as technology. The HKMA published a discussion paper on how lenders should govern AI agents that act on their own, and it said trials of tokenized government paper will soon take in regulated stablecoins. Both point to how Hong Kong intends to supervise products that are still being built.

The measures sit under what the HKMA calls its "DART" framework, the four pillars of the Fintech 2030 strategy it unveiled at the same event a year ago: data and payment, artificial intelligence, resilience and tokenization, according to the HKMA's press release. Yue said the plan has made a lot of progress in its first year, with four years still to run, The Standard reported.

Project SAGE and the HKMA's AI agent rules

SAGE stands for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement. The HKMA said it has formed a cross-sector Agentic Finance Expert Group to support the project. According to The Standard, the group draws on finance, payments, professional services, technology and academia, and will try new uses for AI agents in controlled settings, study how agents from different providers can work together, and draft safeguards.

Yue told the audience that AI has moved from a tool that answers questions to an agent that can carry out tasks on its own, the newspaper reported.

The discussion paper asks the industry for views on supervisory issues around banks' use of agentic AI. The Standard said the questions include who is responsible when an agent acts for a customer, and whether Hong Kong needs a central register of trusted agents or an industry-wide "know your agent" standard modeled on know-your-customer checks.

The regulator also turned to a longer-range risk. With the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and industry participants, it launched a Post-Quantum Cryptography Toolkit to help banks move to encryption that can withstand quantum computers. Yue warned that such machines could arrive in three to 15 years and that banks need several years to prepare, The Standard reported. The HKMA said the toolkit will be updated as standards and practices mature.

Project Ensemble moves to round-the-clock settlement

Project Ensemble, the HKMA's tokenization pilot, was made part of Fintech 2030 to support real-value transactions in tokenized deposits and digital assets, RTHK reported when the strategy was unveiled in November 2025. On Monday, the HKMA said its EnsembleTX platform has reached a new stage that allows 24/7 real-value transactions. The authority said the change could help banks and their clients move funds across markets more flexibly, manage portfolios of tokenized assets and run treasury operations more efficiently.

The HKMA also said it has completed trial trades in which Recognised Dealers bought and sold tokenized Exchange Fund Bills in the secondary market, a step aimed at making secondary and repo trading more efficient. It plans to widen those trials to include regulated stablecoins soon. Hong Kong's licensing regime for stablecoins is already producing products: HSBC has rolled out a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin to PayMe users.

Yue said Hong Kong already runs tokenized bonds, money market funds and gold, and that tokenized deposits now allow interbank payments at any hour, according to The Standard.

A new platform, tConnect Launchpad, set up with Cyberport, will bring financial institutions together with technology firms and digital asset companies to test tokenization use cases, the HKMA said. Yue said the platform would begin accepting applications, The Standard reported.

FPS link with UnionPay

The most visible change for consumers concerns payments. The HKMA said the Faster Payment System will connect with UnionPay International by the end of this year. Users will gradually be able to pay by scanning QR codes at more than 100 million merchants on UnionPay and partner networks in Hong Kong, mainland China and over 40 overseas markets.

In a statement, Yue said banks and fintech firms are now better able to "harness data, A.I., tokenisation and other emerging technologies."

The HKMA co-organized this year's event, the 11th edition, with Invest Hong Kong. Opening the combined FinTech Week and StartmeupHK conference, Chief Executive John Lee said Hong Kong is home to more than 1,400 fintech companies and that the gathering drew about 800 exhibitors and startups and more than 30 delegations.

The next concrete marker is the FPS and UnionPay link, due before Dec. 31. After that, banks will be watching for the expansion of the Exchange Fund Bill trials to stablecoins, which the HKMA has promised but not dated.