Securities and Futures Commission

The profile

The Commission describes itself as an independent statutory body set up in 1989 to regulate Hong Kong's securities and futures markets, drawing its investigative, remedial and disciplinary powers from the Securities and Futures Ordinance, operationally independent of the government and funded mainly by transaction levies and licensing fees. Its own history dates the decision to the 1987 crash: the Securities Review Committee chaired by Ian Hay Davison reported in 1988 recommending a single statutory body outside the civil service, staffed by full-time professionals, funded by the market and vested with broad investigative and disciplinary powers, and the Commission was established in May 1989. The Ordinance itself came into effect on 1 April 2003. It has not required government funding since the early 1990s. Among its functions is one that matters on this beat more than the rest: authorising investment products and offering documents before their distribution to retail investors. It is one of four Hong Kong financial regulators, alongside the Hong Kong Monetary Authority for banking, the Insurance Authority and the Mandatory Provident Fund Schemes Authority, and the split is why a tokenized fund in Hong Kong involves two of them: the Commission authorises the product and the Monetary Authority licenses the stablecoin issuer whose token is used to buy it. Its circular on tokenisation of SFC-authorised investment products, revised on 20 April 2026, sets out what it calls a see-through approach, allowing primary dealing in a tokenized authorised product where the underlying product meets every ordinary authorisation requirement and additional safeguards address the tokenization arrangement. Two of those safeguards define the Commission's position: the product provider remains ultimately responsible for record keeping of ownership regardless of any outsourcing, and providers should not use public permissionless networks without additional and proper controls, the example given being a permissioned token.