Hong Kong as a Fintech Frontier: A Founder's View
On building a financial technology product with HKEX in its first market.
It is by now a commonplace observation that the centre of gravity in global finance has been shifting eastward for a generation. The figures are well-rehearsed; the implications, less so. For a financial technology firm building its first product, the choice of which markets to cover at launch is not a marketing question but an architectural one. Drusus covers HKEX from its first day for reasons that go beyond founder geography.
A Market in Its Own Register
The Hong Kong Exchange occupies an unusual position. It is a venue of genuine global consequence, with capitalisation comfortably in the trillions and a listings profile that includes both the principal Chinese megacaps and a substantial set of internationally-domiciled issuers. Yet it is, in the typical Western analytical product, an afterthought. The free tools cover it superficially or not at all; the institutional tools cover it adequately but at institutional cost. The middle ground is, again, vacant.
For an investor with meaningful exposure to Asian equity, or one who simply wishes to understand the read-across between the Asian session and the European or American ones that follow, the absence of credible coverage in the prosumer tier is a daily inconvenience. Drusus is designed to make HKEX a first-class citizen of the analytical workspace, not a regional appendix to the NYSE and NASDAQ coverage.
The Cross-Listing Question
A particular technical question that any cross-market product must address is the cross-listing one. A given issuer may trade on HKEX in HKD, on the NYSE in USD as an ADR, and on the LSE in GBP. The relationship between these three prices, modulated by the foreign-exchange rates and the typical premium or discount on the secondary listings, is a meaningful analytical object in its own right.
A product that treats the three listings as separate instruments, displaying each in isolation, fails the cross-market investor. A product that consolidates them sensibly, surfacing the FX-adjusted relationship and flagging when the ordinary correspondence between the listings has broken down, serves the cross-market investor properly. Our work has accordingly placed significant emphasis on the latter approach.
A Personal Note
It would be dishonest to omit that the choice of Hong Kong as a first-day market is also a personal one. The author is a Hong Konger; the market is the one he grew up reading. There is, in starting a financial technology firm, a particular satisfaction in building first the instrument one would have wanted oneself. Whether the architectural choices that flow from this orientation will prove commercially correct is a matter the market will decide. But the orientation itself is one we will not apologise for.