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At Hong Kong’s stock exchange, a ‘moon shot’ lab imagines how technology upends the financial marketplace of the future

  • Petrikas co-heads a team including data scientists and software engineers to automate processes to stay abreast of high-technology innovations
  • Shortening IPO process and employing blockchain for instant settlement in Stock Connect’s northbound trading are among key initiatives

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Illustration: Perry Tse
Ji Siqi

On the eighth floor of one of Hong Kong’s most prestigious office towers, far from the madding street protests and coronavirus outbreak that imperilled the local economy, lies a hint of what the city’s future could be as a global financial centre.

Here, Lukas Petrikas and a 20-strong team of data scientists, business analysts and software engineers are toiling away to imagine and redefine Asia’s financial hub, even as the Hong Kong stock exchange closes in on Nasdaq for the coveted 2020 crown as the world’s premier destination for initial public offerings (IPOs), the eighth time in 12 years.

The financial marketplace of the future could be one where the customer is the shareholder. It may be one where data from daily life can be scraped together, structured and traded.

Or it might just be a faster iteration of the current market of equities, bonds, currencies and commodities, augmented by data analytics and artificial intelligence that take the drudgery out of paperwork. Whatever it is, it’s up to Petrikas and his team at Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Limited (HKEX) to prepare Hong Kong for it.

“Hong Kong has always had an opportunistic streak throughout its history, pivoting quickly to capture the economic forces shaping the Asian continent, including trade, shipping, light manufacturing, real estate, aviation, and banking,” Petrikas, co-head of HKEX’s Innovation and Data Lab, said in an interview with South China Morning Post. “Today, Hong Kong is competing head-on with other cities for a share of the global digital economy, where geographical location may matter less than before.”

Lukas Petrikas, co-head of the Innovation and Data Lab of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, speaking at Faster Fintech Forum in Central on 11 July 2019. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
Lukas Petrikas, co-head of the Innovation and Data Lab of the Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, speaking at Faster Fintech Forum in Central on 11 July 2019. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
The lab, located in a nondescript corner of the HKEX office, grew out of the ambitious plan to reform the city’s capital market under the watch of Charles Li Xiaojia, the outgoing chief executive of the world’s third-largest publicly traded bourse operator.
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