The Hong Kong fintech builders

Lee was the founding chief executive of the Algorand Foundation, custodian of a blockchain created by the Turing Award winner Silvio Micali. Under his leadership it reached the top 10 networks by valuation, passing $10 billion. He'd arrived there from 10 years in cloud computing and open source software, working with financial institutions across more than 20 countries.

He now builds in Hong Kong while helping write the rules he operates under. He's senior adviser to the Crypto Council for Innovation, Asia-Pacific policy adviser to the Stablecoin Standard and co-chair of the regulatory committee at Web3 Harbour, and sits on the government's Cyberport Entrepreneurship Committee Advisory Group as an elected member. His argument hasn't changed: stablecoins are settlement and payments infrastructure, and Hong Kong's multi-currency flexibility should interest issuers across the region.

MoneyHero helps people across four markets choose credit cards, loans and insurance, through brands including SingSaver in Singapore, Moneymax in Hong Kong and Money101 in Taiwan. Leung is the person holding its finances together while it grows.

He joined as group director of finance in 2024, became chief financial officer, and now holds the chief executive role alongside it on an interim basis. His remit covers budgeting, forecasting, reporting and financial strategy at a Nasdaq-listed company. MoneyHero's chief executive has credited him with moving the business towards profitable growth through better revenue quality, stronger margins and tighter operating discipline.

Payment systems win on trust long before they win on technology. Liu learned that building Alipay's European business from nothing and then running Alipay UK.

That lesson shapes what she's building now. RD Technologies was founded by Norman Chan, who ran Hong Kong's central banking authority for a decade, and Liu has taken it at the problem from two directions. RD Wallet is a licensed service letting overseas and offshore companies open multi-currency accounts from a phone. HKDR is a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, backed one for one, developed inside the Monetary Authority's testing programme. Her aim is to make stablecoins unremarkable, and that takes wallets, custody and payments working together rather than a coin on its own.

In 2013, when very few people were building anything in crypto, Peng launched a Bitcoin games platform. She'd come from three years at Hong Kong's securities regulator, and went on to spend five more as a founding partner at a blockchain investment firm.

Regulation and investing are unusual preparation for building core internet infrastructure, which is what she did next. She co-founded Scroll in 2021 to make Ethereum faster without breaking the thousands of applications already running on it, working alongside the Ethereum Foundation's own engineers. Her side of the company is the business and the organisation, not the cryptography. She built it distributed from the first day, keeping teams within two time zones of each other so nobody is awake at 3AM for a meeting, and it reached a reported $2 billion valuation within three years.

Lee audited financial statements at KPMG, then worked in insurance. In both jobs he watched identity checks take days that the technology didn't require.

He founded Fill Easy in 2021 to go straight to the source instead. The company connects government identity systems through a single interface, covering Hong Kong's iAM Smart, Singapore's Singpass, UAE Pass and the Chinese mainland, so a business can check a customer against official records rather than a photographed document. The harder part was legal. Fill Easy secured approval under the Greater Bay Area Standard Contract, which allows verified personal data to move lawfully from the mainland into Hong Kong. In March 2025 Prudential Hong Kong adopted the system for its electronic application platform, cutting onboarding time by around 80%.

More than 5 million people across 100 countries now hold a RedotPay card. Many of them are in places where getting a bank card has never been straightforward.

Gao spent 20 years in banking, most recently running institutional banking at DBS. That gave him a clear view of where the existing system reaches easily and where it takes longer to arrive. In 2023 he and Jonathan Chan founded RedotPay to serve the second group, building a card and wallet that let people spend digital dollars anywhere an ordinary card is accepted. Lightspeed, Coinbase Ventures and Accel have backed it.

It can be faster to put cash on a plane than to send it through the banking system. Guo says this plainly, and he spent years in a position to know.

He was among the first 100 people at the payments company Stripe, and moved to Asia in 2015 to open its offices in Hong Kong, Singapore and China. Moving money out of Hong Kong turned out to be easy. Moving it through emerging markets was a different matter, and he couldn't unsee it. In 2018 he and his childhood friend Kevin Kang founded Reap to close that gap, starting with something ordinary: letting small businesses pay rent and salaries by card. It now moves around $6 billion a year for more than 2,000 companies, with stablecoins working underneath while businesses and their suppliers carry on in their own currencies.