Hong Kong's SFC Chief Julia Leung Bets on Longer Trading Hours and Faster Settlement to Win Back Global Capital

Hong Kong's market guardians are not waiting for the tide to turn. With global money stampeding into US equities and the dollar flexing, the city's securities watchdog used a Friday conference stage to signal that it will fight for every dollar of liquidity it can keep — and lure back.

Julia Leung, chief executive of the Securities and Futures Commission, told an Asifma gathering that the regulator is preparing a fresh package of market-structure reforms. The measures under consideration include extended trading hours, a shorter settlement cycle, and cross-market arrangements designed to make Hong Kong's exchanges cheaper and faster to trade. No implementation timeline or final scope was disclosed. The context is blunt: emerging markets across Asia are bleeding capital as US stocks rally and the greenback strengthens, and Hong Kong — Asia's premier offshore financial hub — is not immune.

For outsiders, the SFC is Hong Kong's equivalent of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and Leung is a career regulator who has become the public face of the city's effort to stay competitive. Asifma, the Asian Securities & Financial Markets Association, is the industry lobby whose members — global banks, brokers and asset managers — decide where trading desks sit. When Leung speaks at an Asifma event, she is speaking to the people who route order flow. The reforms she sketched are not abstract policy: extended hours would let Hong Kong overlap more with European and US sessions; a shorter settlement cycle would reduce the collateral and operational drag that institutions weigh when choosing venues; cross-market links would deepen access to mainland Chinese capital. Each is a lever for liquidity.

The timing matters because Hong Kong's problem is structural as much as cyclical. The city's stock exchange has long been the gateway for global money into China and for Chinese companies seeking offshore listings. But Beijing's regulatory crackdowns, geopolitical tensions and a sluggish mainland economy have cooled that pipeline. Meanwhile, US markets have absorbed enormous sums, helped by an AI-driven rally and higher yields. For a family office in Singapore or a sovereign fund in the Gulf, the calculus is simple: why park capital in a market with thinner volumes and wider spreads when Wall Street offers depth and momentum? Leung's answer is to make Hong Kong's plumbing harder to ignore.

The reforms also speak to a wider contest among Asian financial centres. Singapore has gained family offices and hedge fund talent; Tokyo is courting global asset managers with governance reforms; Dubai and Riyadh are building alternatives. Hong Kong's advantage remains its unique connect programmes with mainland China — Stock Connect, Bond Connect — which no rival can replicate. But those channels only matter if the surrounding market is liquid enough to trade efficiently. Shorter settlement and longer hours are not glamorous, but they are the unglamorous infrastructure that determines whether a pension fund executes in Hong Kong or routes the order to New York.

What Leung did not announce is as telling as what she did. There was no headline-grabbing stamp duty cut, no emergency liquidity facility, no sovereign wealth backstop. The SFC is a regulator, not a central bank or a fiscal authority; it can smooth the runway but cannot reverse global capital flows. The heavy lifting on taxes, listing rules and mainland connectivity sits with other arms of government and the exchange itself. That division of labour is a feature of Hong Kong's system, but it also means reform arrives in increments, not shocks.

For the wealthy families and institutions that follow Asia's capital map, the message is that Hong Kong is not conceding. It is trying to re-engineer its market microstructure to compete on speed and cost while its geopolitical and economic advantages are tested. Whether that is enough to stem outflows depends on forces far beyond Leung's remit: the pace of US rate cuts, the health of China's economy, and the willingness of global allocators to re-risk. The SFC has laid out its hand. Now the market will decide whether to play.