SFST's speech at Cyberport Graduation Ceremony for Financial Practitioners FinTech Training Programme (English only)
3.11.2022

Following are the opening remarks by the Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury, Mr Christopher Hui, at the Cyberport Graduation Ceremony for Financial Practitioners FinTech Training Programme today (November 3): Simon (Chairman of Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited, Mr Simon Chan), Peter (Chief Executive Officer of Hong Kong Cyberport Management Company Limited, Mr Peter Yan), fellow members from our advisory group, representatives from our regulators, and all our graduates, Good afternoon. I am delighted to be part of the Cyberport Graduation Ceremony for Financial Practitioners FinTech Training Programme today, and to share the joy of completion of all the online training courses of fintech by the practitioners from your institutions. And congratulations to all who will be receiving awards at this ceremony later on. The award that you get is a recognition of your and your firm's active participation in the training courses. More importantly, it is a gratitude for your dedication and commitment on spending time on upskilling the fintech knowledge of your staff. Obvious to many of you here today who are experts of the fintech field, fintech adoption is an irreversible trend in the financial services and commercial sectors around the world. Fintech applications enable financial institutions to enhance operational efficiency, while the general public and business entities alike enjoy more diversified and innovative financial services. As I mentioned in the Fintech Week held earlier this week, the Government attached great importance to fintech development, and have rolled out different measures to facilitate it. In particular, we see that talent is an essential building block for fintech development. Practitioners equipped with knowledge on fintech adoption and application would likely enhance their institutions' confidence and capability to embrace digitisation. It is therefore amongst our top priority to develop and nurture a pool of fintech talents, in particular those who are adept at finance knowledge and application of technology at the same time. In this connection, many of our academic institutions are offering different diploma, bachelor or even master degree programmes on fintech. Another aspect that we focus on is to provide short-term training courses on specific topics of fintech for in-service financial practitioners, for them to flexibly choose according to their own interests and needs. It is against this background that the Financial Practitioners FinTech Training Programme was launched. With the success of the first round in 2020, the second round of the programme launched early this year was enhanced in terms of curriculum, range of speakers, as well as the structure. First, the Webinar Series, administered by Cyberport and comprising 12 different sessions, had this year drawn participation of over 2 600 practitioners from the banking, securities and insurance sector, more than double the last round. I am sure you will all agree with me that, based on the post-training session surveys, the Webinar sources have been very insightful and useful. Not to mention they also count towards your continuous professional training/development credits. Furthermore, it was the first time this year that we ventured into providing subsidies for trade associations in organising tailor-made fintech training for their members on their own, thus responding more directly to the training needs of the market. We are glad to see that there were seven such tailor-made training courses being organised, and I look forward to seeing the results upon their completion later this year. Apart from the training programme, we also seek to upskill fintech practitioners in Hong Kong by developing professional qualifications for them. The first batch of such qualifications recognised under the Qualifications Framework were launched in September 2022. To encourage practitioners in acquiring such quality-assured qualifications, we have rolled out a pilot scheme to subsidise 80 per cent of their tuition fees. The move seeks to enhance the professional development of the fintech practitioners, and catalysing the digital transformation of the financial services sector. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Cyberport for once again administering this year's training programme. I would also like to thank you all for your participation and dedication. Lastly, I would like to congratulate the award winners again and wish you all good health. Thank you.