HSBC participates in Project e-HKD+

This follows HSBC’s participation in the e-HKD Phase 1 pilots in 2023. In addition, HSBC welcomes the expansion of Project e-HKD to Project e-HKD+ by the HKMA, with the project scope broadened to explore innovative use cases for new forms of digital money that can be used by individuals and corporates, including e-HKD and tokenised deposits. Today’s announcement highlights HSBC’s ongoing commitment to advancing Hong Kong’s digital money agenda.

In last year’s pilot, HSBC explored potential retail use cases and programmability for digital money. Building on this work, in the coming months, HSBC will test how digital money can operate securely on permissioned protocols on public Distributed Ledger Technology (“DLT”) environments for storing and transferring value, potentially serve as a settlement utility for tokenised assets, and address privacy concerns.

Luanne Lim, Chief Executive Officer, Hong Kong, HSBC said, “As Hong Kong’s largest note-issuing bank, it is important for us to be at the forefront of digital money development. We will leverage our global in-house innovation expertise to deepen research in digital money applications.”

HSBC’s involvement in digital asset and money initiatives highlights its pioneering efforts in shaping the future of money and finance. In addition to its participation in Project e-HKD+, HSBC has been supporting the HKMA’s initiatives on digital assets and digital money, which include Project mBridge, Project Ensemble and the issuance of digital green bonds.

Within Project Ensemble, HSBC has conducted proof-of-concept testing to demonstrate the feasibility of the exchange of tokenised deposits and digital assets, as well as the transfer of deposit tokens between blockchains of different financial institutions.

Leveraging HSBC Orion as the digital assets platform, HSBC helped the HKMA complete a HKD6 billion-equivalent digitally native green bond issuance for the Hong Kong Government in February 2024. This issuance, which spanned four currencies (HKD, CNH, USD, EUR), was the largest digital bond issuance globally, as well as the first multi-currency digital bond issuance.