Hong Kong's capital markets are posting their strongest numbers in years, and regulators and financial technology firms are moving quickly to build the settlement and tokenisation infrastructure they say the market now demands. Data from KPMG China show the city raised HK$109.9 billion across 40 IPO listings in the first quarter of 2026, a 489% increase in funds raised compared to the same period in 2025 and the best first-quarter performance in five years, based on KPMG's analysis of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) activity.

The recovery follows a sustained slump. Between 2022 and 2024, Hong Kong's exchange lost ground to competing financial centres as US interest rates rose, geopolitical tensions weighed on China-linked equities, and the Hang Seng Index fell to multi-year lows in late 2023. The reversal has been sharp. HKEX ranked first globally in IPO funds raised in full-year 2025, collecting HK$280 billion, up 218% year on year. A+H dual listings, which give Chinese companies two parallel share classes (A-shares listed on the Shanghai or Shenzhen exchanges and H-shares listed in Hong Kong, each maintained on separate share registers), accounted for 60% of all Q1 2026 IPO proceeds. KPMG forecasts full-year 2026 proceeds of HK$350 billion.

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Settlement Infrastructure Under Pressure

The volume surge is putting strain on the plumbing that supports it. HKEX published a consultation paper in April 2026 proposing a shift from T+2 to T+1 settlement for equities, ETFs, REITs, structured products, and SEHK-traded debt.

T+2 means a trade takes two business days to fully settle; moving to T+1 compresses that to one day, reducing counterparty risk but requiring significant operational upgrades from brokers, custodians, and clearing participants. The target implementation date is Q4 2027. Northbound Stock Connect trades, which connect Hong Kong to mainland Chinese exchanges, are excluded from the proposal and will require separate cross-border coordination.

The T+1 timeline creates an operational modernisation window that financial technology firms are competing to fill.

Note: The market commentary and volume data attributed to Broadridge Financial Solutions in the following section originated in a sponsored feature published by the South China Morning Post on June 16, 2026. All Broadridge-sourced figures, including DLR volume statistics and growth claims drawn from the firm's own press materials, should be read in that context.

Broadridge Financial Solutions, a NYSE-listed financial technology firm (NYSE: BR), announced in May 2026 that it was extending its tokenised securities platform to cover equities, funds, alternatives, and money market instruments, connecting to the Canton Network, Ethereum, and other EVM-compatible blockchains.

The firm's existing Distributed Ledger Repo (DLR) platform, which processes repurchase agreements using tokenised representations of securities, now handles more than $365 billion per day in volume, up nearly 300% year on year, with cumulative processed volumes of nearly $8 trillion.

Wout Kalis, Broadridge's senior country officer for Hong Kong, pointed to Chinese firms' growing use of the city as a global capital-raising hub. "Chinese investors are increasingly using Hong Kong as a way of raising capital and selling their products to the globe," Kalis said. "This is a massive change from before, and that's great for Hong Kong." He framed governance infrastructure as the key credibility requirement for tokenised markets: "Good governance will be critical…because it will give the trust to investors."

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Regulators Move From Pilot to Live Transactions

On the regulatory side, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) moved its Project Ensemble initiative beyond sandbox testing in November 2025, launching a live pilot called EnsembleTX. The pilot enables real-value interbank settlement of tokenised money market fund transactions using tokenised deposits, settled over Hong Kong's existing HKD Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system. By design, and consistent with HKMA's stated framework for institutional digital asset infrastructure, the architecture is permissioned and bank-anchored, meaning settlement runs through licensed financial institutions rather than public blockchains. Developers building open-chain real-world asset (RWA) products should factor in that Hong Kong's institutional settlement layer currently leans toward private, regulated networks.

EnsembleTX sits within a broader policy architecture. Hong Kong's Virtual Asset Policy 2.0, published in June 2025, identifies stablecoins, RWA tokenisation, and tokenised ETFs as national-level priorities and provides the overarching framework within which EnsembleTX, the Stablecoin Ordinance, and the current SFC consultations are all operating simultaneously.

Stablecoin regulation is also moving. Hong Kong's Stablecoin Ordinance took effect on August 1, 2025, and the HKMA had received 36 licence applications from stablecoin issuers by December of that year. Separately, nine entities held active virtual asset service provider (VASP) licences as of February 2025, a category of licence issued by the Securities and Futures Commission under a distinct regulatory framework from stablecoin authorisation. The SFC and the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau issued consultation conclusions in May 2026 on regulating virtual asset advisors, with further legislation covering dealers and custodians expected to follow.

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Regional Implications

The buildout carries consequences beyond Hong Kong. India, which completed its own T+1 rollout across all SEBI-listed equities in 2023, has been monitoring HKMA's tokenised settlement experiments as its own digital rupee and tokenised securities programmes develop, with observers noting potential future interoperability corridors between the two markets.

In Africa, the South African Reserve Bank and the Central Bank of Nigeria, which has run its own eNaira digital currency experiment, are among the institutions understood to be observing HKMA's tokenised deposit settlement model.

For Nigerian users already active in crypto at high volumes, Hong Kong's move toward licensed stablecoin issuance could eventually open regulated onramps for HKD and USD-denominated stablecoins serving remittance and cross-border trade corridors.

The global RWA tokenisation market, which covers assets like bonds, real estate, and trade receivables converted into blockchain-based tokens, reached an estimated $30.91 billion as of September 2025, according to research aggregated from academic and industry sources including an SSRN working paper and W3X Network data.

Hong Kong's combination of a revived IPO pipeline, a maturing regulatory framework, and live institutional settlement infrastructure positions it as a consequential venue for where that market develops next. With more than 300 active IPO applications in the pipeline as of late 2025, the demands on the underlying infrastructure are only intensifying. Kalis captured the central test facing the tokenisation buildout directly: "It needs to solve specific market issues." Governance, he argued, is what transforms promising architecture into something investors will actually trust.