The legal minds turning Hong Kong's fintech rulebook into practice

Cassidy puts questions to the regulator on behalf of an industry rather than one client at a time. She chairs the Hong Kong regulatory committee of AIMA, the trade body for hedge fund managers, and her team files the submissions when the Securities and Futures Commission consults on reform. In April 2025 the commission and the Monetary Authority issued circulars permitting licensed platforms and banks to commit clients' tokens to a blockchain network in return for rewards. Cassidy's note to clients a month later picked out the catch. A platform needs the commission's written approval first, imposed as a condition on its licence, before it can offer the service at all.

She joined A&O Shearman in May 2026 to lead its Hong Kong financial services regulatory practice, after nearly 19 years at Herbert Smith Freehills, where she ran the same practice across Asia. Payments, money laundering controls, client assets and licensing make up the rest of the work.

Hallatt's work usually starts after a regulator has opened a file. He defends banks and brokers in investigations by the Securities and Futures Commission and the Monetary Authority, on money laundering controls, systems and controls failures, market misconduct and sponsor conduct on listings. He arrived at Gibson Dunn's Hong Kong office in 2021 from Herbert Smith Freehills with three associates, and now co-chairs the firm's financial regulatory practice and heads it across Asia-Pacific.

The advisory half is public, and dated. He has written his firm's running commentary on Hong Kong's digital asset rules since the Monetary Authority's 2022 discussion paper on crypto-assets, through the stablecoin consultations and the dealing and custody conclusions of December 2025. When the Monetary Authority issued expanded standards on 27 May 2026 for banks holding digital assets on behalf of clients, his team published its reading of them on 12 June. He is admitted in Hong Kong and in England and Wales.

Man co-led the Baker McKenzie team acting for Harvest Global Investments when Hong Kong authorised its first exchange traded funds holding bitcoin and ether directly. The Securities and Futures Commission approved the two funds on 24 April 2024 and they listed six days later, putting a product ordinary investors could buy inside a framework the commission had spent the preceding year assembling.

Licence applications to that commission are what the legal directory Chambers singles her out for. Man runs Baker McKenzie's financial services regulatory practice globally from Hong Kong, where she also heads the firm's non-contentious regulatory and fintech practices, and she took Best in Financial Services Regulatory at the Women in Business Law Awards for Asia in 2020. She is admitted in Hong Kong, the UK and Australia, and holds economics and law degrees from Sydney University. In 2026 she has been speaking on the record about stablecoins and tokenised deposits in cross-border payments, which is the next question her clients are asking.

In June 2017 McCormack led King & Wood Mallesons for the Open ANX Foundation on a token sale her firm describes as Hong Kong's first international one. It raised about US$15 million in its first 12 hours, against a target of US$22.5 million. Nobody knew at the time whether a sale of that kind counted as a securities offering, and being wrong carried criminal exposure rather than a commercial setback. She took the work anyway.

She has spent the years since inside the bodies that settle questions like it. McCormack sits on the Securities and Futures Commission's fintech advisory group, co-chairs the policy and advocacy committee of the FinTech Association of Hong Kong, and belongs to the fintech working group at ASIFMA, the regional association for banks and asset managers, and to the World Economic Forum's decentralised finance working group. She is a contributing author of ASIFMA's best practice guidance for digital asset exchanges, its roadmap for tokenised securities and its paper on artificial intelligence. She is admitted in Hong Kong, Australia and England and Wales, and Chambers' 2026 fintech guide records that she has returned to Australia and now splits her time between the firm's Sydney and Hong Kong offices.

Ng went into crypto work full time in 2017, years before Hong Kong had a licensing framework to practise under. He was in-house legal at two Asian exchange groups, OKX and Huobi, before joining Mulana Investment Management, the Hong Kong asset manager where he now runs legal and compliance.

The Securities and Futures Commission licensed that firm on 24 November 2023 to deal in and advise on securities and to manage assets, with crypto as its focus, and added futures advice on 2 July 2024. Ng applies those permissions from inside the business rather than advising on them from outside. He is also legal director of the Association of Blockchain Compliance Professionals, which trains compliance staff and government bodies, and has since founded the legal advisory firm Mura.

ZhongAn Virtual Finance's banking licence took effect on 27 March 2019, one of the first three the Monetary Authority granted to banks that run without branches. Siu co-led the King & Wood Mallesons team on the application, which ran through regulatory structuring, cybersecurity, privacy and mainland approvals. She called it at the time "a breakthrough for Hong Kong's progression into smart banking."

Her practice started in derivatives and moved into the machinery of digital banking, including account opening and identity checks carried out entirely online. Chambers credits her with advising on many of that first group of applications. KWM acted for the custodian of Hong Kong's first batch of spot crypto exchange traded funds in 2024, with Siu among the supporting partners, and she co-authored the firm's client guidance published the day the Stablecoins Ordinance took effect. She is qualified in Hong Kong and in England and Wales, and speaks Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

Wong worked in-house at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority before returning to private practice, so she has seen a file from the side that opens it. Much of her work now is contentious. She represents firms in investigations and disciplinary inquiries involving the Securities and Futures Commission, the Monetary Authority, the stock exchange, the police and the anti-corruption commission.

The advisory side is where the stablecoin work sits. In 2026 she co-wrote a set of client questions and answers on the new stablecoin rules, working through who the Monetary Authority expects on an applicant's board and where its senior managers have to be based. Those two conditions quietly decide whether a foreign issuer can apply at all. She has also been in-house at Credit Suisse and a partner at Howse Williams, and joined Reed Smith in Hong Kong in April 2023 after close to three decades in banking and securities regulation. Chambers Greater China ranked her in 2026 for both contentious and non-contentious financial services regulatory work.