Unlocking the power of digital assets and currencies

For HSBC and our clients, digital assets have always been a commercial topic. Our clients demand solutions that deliver liquidity and tangible market benefits, such as more rapid settlement times – not innovation for innovation’s sake.

Smart and proportionate regulation is critical for all financial markets, and digital assets are no different.

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By John O’Neill, Group Head of Digital Assets and Currencies, HSBC.

We’ve long asked for appropriate regulation for digital assets and currencies because this provides the confidence our clients need to conduct their business safely and efficiently.

We’re now increasingly seeing the appropriate regulation in place in major financial centres and this, combined with easy market access, is helping power the market’s development and growth.

Building trust

Recent activity, including a broad range of regulatory developments in the US, the recent Hong Kong stablecoin ordinance, and the ongoing stablecoin consultation in the UK, are all welcome.

These and other regulatory developments have helped build trust that digital asset markets can be accessible and useful for mainstream investors.

This is vital for our clients. Our clients trust us to deliver safe, regulated solutions that can reach commercial scale, which has always been the priority for everything we do in digital assets and currencies. That scale requires easy access.

Easy access

An increasingly wide range of investors can access digital bonds because of the way we’ve created our HSBC Orion platform, combining natively digital issuances with easy market access via our existing infrastructure.

As a result, we’re now seeing at-scale adoption and liquidity that’s equivalent to the levels of conventional bond markets.

More than 200 investors participated in our record-breaking digital bond issuance (opens in new window) for the Hong Kong government in 2025. And we’re delighted that the UK government recently chose HSBC Orion as the platform provider for its Digital Gilt Instrument pilot issuance.

We’ve also built commercial scale by being the first bank in the world to offer tokenised ownership of physical gold to retail clients with HSBC Gold Token in Hong Kong.

It’s now among the largest tokenised gold products in the world and one of the reasons why is that we’ve made the product easy to access via our existing HSBC HK app.

Building scale

Achieving scale and liquidity is also vital for digital currencies and payments. HSBC is a global leader in payments, with a particular strength in domestic and cross-border corporate activity.

We process large amounts of payments between multiple locations in multiple currencies. Our clients value the liquidity and scale we can achieve using both central and commercial bank money.

Our Tokenised Deposit Service delivers multi-currency payment coverage in commercial bank money between an expanding list of global locations and is easy for our clients to adopt.

Tokenised deposits allow our customers to transact in safe and stable commercial bank money and use existing and trusted know-your-customer and anti-money laundering approaches.

By delivering pioneering digital asset and currency solutions that harness appropriate regulation and easy market access, we’re helping to drive liquidity in these markets.

Like everything we do, our focus is delivering real value for our clients - one step at a time.