The Hong Kong Monetary Authority launched Project SAGE on November 2, an initiative to help the city's financial industry put AI agents to work on customers' behalf while a governance framework is built alongside them. HKMA Chief Executive Eddie Yue announced the project at the 11th Hong Kong FinTech Week, which the HKMA co-organised with Invest Hong Kong.
SAGE stands for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement. The HKMA paired the launch with a cross-sectoral Agentic Finance Expert Group drawn from financial institutions, technology service providers, professional services firms and academia. It also published a discussion paper on banks' use of agentic AI and asked the industry for feedback on supervisory considerations.
“has the potential to transform how financial services are delivered and utilised”— Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority
Project SAGE runs on four workstreams. The first explores real-world use cases in three segments: consumer agentic shopping and everyday payments, business procurement and treasury management, and machine-to-machine payments for digital services billed by usage.
Key facts
- 01The HKMA launched Project SAGE on November 2, 2026, at the 11th Hong Kong FinTech Week.
- 02SAGE stands for Securing Agentic Finance with Governance and Enablement.
- 03Its four workstreams cover use cases, agent identity including Know Your Agent checks, interoperability standards and legal frameworks.
- 04A cross-sector Agentic Finance Expert Group spans banks, tech providers, professional services firms and academia.
- 05The HKMA also published a discussion paper on banks' use of agentic AI and is seeking industry feedback.
The second workstream covers agent identity, meaning how a bank verifies which AI agent it is dealing with and what authority a customer has delegated to it. The HKMA is including "Know Your Agent" mechanisms in that work.
The third workstream covers interoperability standards, the protocols agents and institutions would use to interact securely across the ecosystem. The fourth covers the legal and regulatory questions, including governance, legal liability and consumer protection.
The scope reaches past back-office automation. Project SAGE addresses the shift from internal operations to customer-facing services such as payments, along with the regulatory and cybersecurity risks that come with autonomous tools carrying out transactions for customers.
SAGE follows the HKMA's ART framework, built around accountability, resilience and trust, which the regulator released in October with supervisory guidance and plans to explore agentic AI governance.
Project SAGE is an exploration and coordination effort rather than a new binding rule. The HKMA has not published an implementation timetable or pilot outcomes, and the agent identity and interoperability arrangements are not final standards.
The HKMA announced several other projects at FinTech Week. It launched a post-quantum cryptography toolkit with HKUST to help banks plan their transition, said its EnsembleTX platform now supports 24/7 settlement of tokenised transactions with trials set to expand to regulated stablecoins, and said the Faster Payment System will link with UnionPay International by the end of 2026.
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