Finance

Asian Financial Forum 2026 Set for January Return With Focus on Finance, Technology, and Regional Growth – FinTech Weekly

Published

4 months ago

January 24, 2026

Asian Financial Forum 2026 Set for January Return With Focus on Finance, Technology, and Regional Growth – FinTech Weekly

The Asian Financial Forum 2026 will take place on January 26–27 in Hong Kong, bringing together global leaders to discuss economic trends, fintech, AI, green technology, and cross-border collaboration, alongside expanded deal-making sessions.

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Asian Financial Forum Confirms 2026 Dates and Program Direction

The Asian Financial Forum (AFF) will return on January 26 and 27, 2026, bringing together government officials, financial executives, investors, and business leaders from around the world. The event is Asia’s first major financial gathering of the year, positioning it as an early venue for discussions on economic trends and policy priorities.

The forum will once again serve as a meeting point for decision-makers focused on global markets and regional development. AFF has built its reputation as a platform where public and private sector leaders exchange views on finance, trade, and innovation while forming new international business connections.

The 2026 edition will focus on cooperation between policymakers and the business community in response to changing economic conditions and shifting trade patterns. The program will also give attention to sectors linked to digital transformation and sustainability.

Participation Expected From Thousands of Global Delegates

Organizers expect more than 3,600 participants from over 60 countries and regions. The speaker lineup is projected to include more than 130 global speakers from government, finance, and industry.

Senior leadership representation remains a key feature of the event. Data from the forum indicates that about 81 percent of attendees come from CEO-level or senior decision-making roles. This includes executives from financial institutions, multinational companies, and technology firms.

The exhibition segment is also set to expand. Organizers report that more than 140 exhibitors, startups, and service providers are expected to take part, reflecting the forum’s role as both a policy discussion platform and a business networking venue.

Program Theme Highlights Joint Efforts Across Markets

The theme selected for AFF 2026 centers on cooperation between global business communities and policymakers. Organizers say the goal is to examine how coordinated efforts can support growth across regions and industries during a period of economic adjustment.

Rather than focusing on a single region or sector, the forum plans to address shared challenges that affect international markets. Topics include financial stability, cross-border investment flows, digital infrastructure, and sustainable development.

The agenda is expected to include panel discussions, keynote sessions, and closed-door meetings designed to promote practical exchanges between public officials and private sector leaders.

Focus on Technology-Driven Sectors

Technology will again play a central role in the 2026 program. Organizers confirmed that several high-growth sectors will receive dedicated attention, including fintech, artificial intelligence, robotics, green technology, new energy solutions, and web3-related applications.

Financial technology remains a key area of interest as banks, payment providers, and regulators continue to adapt to digital services. Sessions are expected to address topics such as digital payments, regulatory compliance, and cross-border transaction systems.

AI and robotics will also be discussed in the context of productivity and labor markets. Business leaders and policymakers are expected to review how automation tools affect manufacturing, logistics, and service industries.

Green technology and energy transition initiatives will form another core part of the agenda. Discussions are expected to focus on financing models that support low-carbon projects and infrastructure development.

Linking Finance With the Real Economy

AFF organizers said the forum will continue to examine the relationship between financial systems and real economic activity. This includes how capital markets, banking services, and investment tools support small businesses, infrastructure projects, and regional trade.

The program aims to highlight ways financial institutions can improve access to funding for companies operating in emerging sectors. Attention will also be given to risk management and regulatory frameworks that influence lending and investment behavior.

Participants are expected to review how financial policy decisions affect employment, supply chains, and long-term economic stability across Asia and beyond.

AFF Deal-Making Program Expands Business Matching

Alongside policy discussions, AFF will host its dedicated deal-making segment designed to connect investors with project owners and companies seeking funding.

According to figures released by the forum, the deal-making platform is expected to facilitate more than 720 business meetings. Participation is projected to include more than 280 investors, over 560 projects, and approximately 510 project owners.

Organizers describe the program as a structured matchmaking environment where participants can explore partnerships and investment opportunities. Meetings are typically arranged in advance, allowing investors and businesses to hold targeted discussions over the two-day event.

This component reflects the forum’s dual role as both a discussion venue and a practical business exchange platform.

Government and Institutional Participation

AFF traditionally attracts senior government representatives and officials from regulatory bodies. Organizers say this participation allows for direct dialogue between policymakers and private sector leaders.

Government involvement also provides insight into regulatory developments and economic policy priorities. These discussions are particularly relevant for international investors seeking clarity on market access rules and compliance requirements.

Financial institutions and multilateral organizations are also expected to play a visible role in the 2026 event. Their presence supports conversations around regional integration and cross-border financial cooperation.

Asia’s Position in Global Finance

The forum takes place at a time when Asia continues to expand its role in global trade and investment. Regional financial centers remain active in areas such as capital markets, asset management, and digital payments.

AFF organizers emphasize the importance of presenting economic trends from an Asian perspective. This approach reflects the region’s growing influence in technology development, manufacturing, and infrastructure investment.

Participants from outside Asia also attend the forum to better understand regional market conditions and identify partnership opportunities.

Industry Representation Across Multiple Sectors

Beyond financial services, the forum draws participation from a wide range of industries. Technology firms, energy companies, logistics providers, and manufacturing groups are among those represented.

This broad industry mix allows discussions to cover topics that affect multiple sectors. Examples include supply chain financing, digital transformation strategies, and cross-border trade logistics.

The exhibition area provides companies with an opportunity to present products and services related to financial infrastructure, data analytics, compliance tools, and enterprise software.

Preparing for Policy and Market Developments

The timing of AFF early in the calendar year positions it as a venue for setting priorities and reviewing economic forecasts. Business leaders often use the forum to assess market conditions and prepare for upcoming regulatory changes.

Discussions typically address monetary policy trends, interest rate outlooks, and geopolitical factors that influence investment decisions. These sessions provide participants with context for planning corporate strategies and capital allocation.

For policymakers, the forum offers feedback from the private sector on regulatory proposals and market conditions.

Digital Infrastructure and Cross-Border Connectivity

Another area of focus for AFF 2026 involves digital infrastructure and international connectivity. Topics include payment systems, data sharing standards, and cybersecurity frameworks.

Cross-border transactions remain a priority for businesses operating across Asia and global markets. Sessions are expected to examine how digital tools can improve transaction speed, transparency, and cost efficiency.

This part of the program reflects growing interest in modernizing financial infrastructure to support international commerce.

Role of Startups and Emerging Companies

Startups and emerging companies will also feature in the 2026 forum. Organizers expect a strong presence from technology firms offering new financial and enterprise solutions.

These companies often use AFF as a platform to meet investors, form partnerships, and explore expansion into new markets. Their participation adds a practical business dimension to the event alongside policy discussions.

The presence of service providers and technology vendors further supports knowledge sharing across the financial ecosystem.

What to Watch Ahead of the Forum

As the event approaches, attention will turn to the final speaker lineup and detailed program schedule. Market participants will watch for announcements related to policy themes and industry priorities.

Investors and corporate executives are likely to focus on sessions addressing digital finance, sustainability, and regional trade integration. Government representatives are expected to use the platform to communicate policy directions and regulatory updates.

The deal-making program will also draw interest from companies seeking funding and partnerships.

A Platform for Regional and Global Dialogue

AFF 2026 is set to continue its role as a meeting place for public and private sector leaders. The combination of policy discussion, business matching, and technology-focused sessions reflects the forum’s broad scope.

Organizers aim to provide a structured environment for dialogue on economic trends and practical business cooperation. With thousands of participants expected, the event will once again serve as a focal point for financial and business activity at the start of the year.

Further details about the forum are available through the official Asian Financial Forum website: https://www.asianfinancialforum.com/conference/aff/en

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Finance

Hong Kong property recovery tested as bigger student housing deals gain traction

Published

2 hours ago

May 31, 2026

Press Room

Hong Kong property recovery tested as bigger student housing deals gain traction

Hong Kong’s student housing sector is entering a new phase as larger institutional-style deals emerge from the city’s distressed commercial property market, signalling that professional investors are cautiously returning after years of falling asset values.

Investors and analysts said the market was moving beyond the smaller hotel conversions that dominated the past two years, with more sizeable transactions expected as financing conditions improve, distressed sales accelerate, and buyers hunt for assets capable of generating stable income.

“This year and next year, there will be more sizeable transactions,” said Kavis Ip, CEO of Centaline Investment.

The clearest example came last month when Centaline acquired the Regal Oriental Hotel in Kowloon City for HK$1.52 billion (US$194 million), in what is set to become Hong Kong’s largest private student housing estate with about 1,500 beds.

Unlike earlier student housing projects typically backed by smaller private investors, the Regal deal was structured with an equity partner and sized for eventual exit to institutional buyers such as insurers, sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms.

“We always wanted to do deals of this size,” Ip said. “Large institutional-grade assets create a completely different buyer pool when you eventually exit.”

Finance

Goldman Sachs massively resets Snowflake stock price target for 2026

Published

12 hours ago

May 30, 2026

Press Room

Goldman Sachs massively resets Snowflake stock price target for 2026

In February and March 2026, Snowflake was the stock Wall Street couldn’t quite figure out. The stock was down 50% from the early January high to early April 2026, according to TradingView data. Snowflake was caught between a decelerating core business and an AI narrative that kept getting pushed further into the future.

Then Snowflake reported earnings. And the stock jumped 37% in a single session. Goldman Sachs responded with one of its most dramatic price target increases on a major software stock this year, raising its Snowflake (SNOW) target in a note shared with me at TheStreet.

SNOW is now trading at $255.37, up 16.42% year-to-date after the post-earnings surge, according to Yahoo Finance.

The Goldman note identified two specific dynamics converging inside Snowflake’s business right now that the market had been underpricing. Once you understand both, the 37% single-day move starts to look less like euphoria and more like a rational repricing.

Goldman Sachs raises Snowflake price target to $278 from $216

Right after earnings, Goldman Sachs raised its Snowflake (SNOW) target to $278 from $216 in a note shared with me at TheStreet, while maintaining its Buy rating. The two AI inflections Goldman mentioned in the note are compounding simultaneously within Snowflake’s business.

The first is external: the proliferation of AI coding tools is making it dramatically easier for enterprises to migrate from legacy data platforms to modern ones like Snowflake. Migrations that previously required months of engineering work are being compressed.

More Wall Street:

The cost of switching has fallen. The urgency to switch has risen as companies need governed, structured data environments to run AI applications. Snowflake is the direct beneficiary of both forces.

The second is internal: Cortex Code. That’s Snowflake’s own AI coding product, launched in general availability in mid-February 2026, which embeds a context-aware AI coding agent directly into the development workflow.

It enables customers to build, deploy, and iterate on data pipelines, analytics, and AI agents faster while remaining fully governed within the Snowflake environment.

Related: Snowflake stock analyst reveals surprising stock forecast

Adoption has been the fastest of any Snowflake product in company history, with over 7,100 accounts already using it — approximately 50% penetration — according to the Q1 earnings release report and the note.

Goldman Sachs described Cortex Code as both a new revenue stream and a force multiplier on the core business. It was the largest single driver of the full-year guidance raise. Goldman called it “a step function in consumption.”

Snowflake’s product revenue is $1.33 billion, up 34% year over year.Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Snowflake’s Q1 fiscal 2027 results delivered the proof Goldman needed

The first-quarter fiscal 2027 results from Snowflake’s May 27 earnings release:

Product revenue of $1.33 billion, up 34% year over year — the strongest sequential dollar growth in company history.
Total revenue of $1.39 billion, up 33% year over year.
Net revenue retention rate of 126%.
779 customers with trailing 12-month product revenue above $1 million, up 29% year over year.
46 new customers crossed the $1 million threshold in Q1, compared to 26 a year ago.
813 Forbes Global 2000 customers.
Remaining performance obligations of $9.21 billion, up 38% year over year.
Full-year fiscal 2027 product revenue guidance raised to $5.84 billion from $5.66 billion.
Source: Snowflake First Quarter of Fiscal 2027 Results

“Q1 marks a clear inflection point in that journey,” CEO Sridhar Ramaswammy said in the earnings release.

“With Cortex Code and Snowflake Intelligence, we are extending from the trusted foundation for enterprise data and context to become the control plane for the Agentic Enterprise,” Ramaswamy added.

Related: Snowflake stock spikes on $6B deal with cloud giant

Goldman raised its full-year fiscal 2027 revenue estimate to $6.09 billion from $5.91 billion and its fiscal 2028 and 2029 estimates proportionally, according to the note.

The new $278 price target reflects an Enterprise Value-to-Forward (EV/Fwd) unlevered free cash flow multiple, up from 45x, justified by higher growth.

The Natoma acquisition and AWS deal extend Snowflake’s AI surface area

The Q1 results came alongside two strategic moves that expand Snowflake’s addressable market beyond core data warehousing.

Snowflake signed a definitive agreement to acquire Natoma. This is an enterprise Model Context Protocol platform for AI agents meant to extend governance to AI-driven workflows beyond the data layer.

The acquisition enables AI agents to securely connect to tools customers use daily, directly within and beyond the Snowflake environment. Goldman flagged this as constructive evidence of Snowflake broadening its monetizable surface.

Related: Bank of America tweaks Snowflake stock price target before earnings

The $6 billion multi-year AWS collaboration agreement, also announced in the quarter, accelerates enterprise AI adoption globally and deepens the hyperscaler integration that enterprise customers increasingly expect from their data platform of choice. A deepened OpenAI partnership for co-innovation and joint go-to-market efforts adds another AI credibility layer.

My review of the full guidance picture reveals a company now projecting 31% growth for the full fiscal year 2027 — accelerating from 29% in fiscal 2026 — with non-GAAP operating margins of 13.5%, up from prior guidance of 12.5%.

That simultaneous acceleration of growth and margins is the combination that software investors pay premium multiples for. Goldman believes Snowflake has found that combination.

Related: Goldman Sachs doubles down on S&P 500 message for 2026

This story was originally published by TheStreet on May 30, 2026, where it first appeared in the Investing section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

Finance

Bank Regulation and Risks to Financial Stability | The Regulatory Review

Published

22 hours ago

May 30, 2026

Press Room

Bank Regulation and Risks to Financial Stability | The Regulatory Review

Scholars examine bank and cryptocurrency regulation and assess potential risks to financial stability and resilience.

Federal banking regulators recently proposed rules to implement the Basel III Endgame framework. Global banking regulators developed the Basel III framework after the 2008 financial crisis to strengthen bank regulation, supervision, and risk management through a set of international standards. The final set of rules to implement the framework has been dubbed “Basel III Endgame.”

Although regulators originally planned to finalize and implement the Basel III accord by the beginning of 2023, countries have repeatedly delayed implementation while tailoring the framework to national interests and as banks and policymakers around the world increasingly embrace a more deregulatory approach.

The updated proposal follows a 2023 proposal from the Biden Administration that drew criticism for threatening to impose burdensome capital requirements on U.S. banks that could reduce lending and credit availability. Regulators argued that strengthening risk-based capital requirements for large banks would promote financial stability and resilience, but critics contended that the proposal could instead restrict banks’ lending capacity and push lending and traditional bank activity into more lightly regulated shadow banking sectors, such as private credit.

The latest proposal departs significantly from the 2023 proposal and would reduce the regulatory burden on large banks. The banking industry has applauded the recent deregulatory push, but critics warn that this approach risks weakening bank regulatory infrastructure only a few years after several major bank failures revealed ongoing gaps in bank supervision. Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse in 2023 marked the third-largest bank failure in U.S. history and required major emergency intervention. Although U.S. bank regulators largely contained the fallout and prevented contagion risks, the episode highlighted ongoing systemic risks to financial stability.

Debate over U.S. banking regulation also coincides with financial innovation and the rise of cryptocurrency, which have upended traditional financial services. The proposal comes less than a year after Congress passed the GENIUS Act, which established a baseline framework for stablecoin issuance. The GENIUS Act represented a significant regulatory breakthrough in a rapidly developing industry but left open many questions about its implementation and the future of cryptocurrency and stablecoin regulation. Federal regulators recently proposed rules to begin implementing the GENIUS Act framework, which will take effect in January 2027.

In this week’s seminar, scholars explore and offer competing views on current risks to the banking system and financial stability and identify potential regulatory vulnerabilities, including new payment systems tied to cryptocurrency.

In a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Stephen Cecchetti and co-authors advocate implementation of the Basel III Endgame standards and higher U.S. capital requirements for large banks. They argue that criticisms of the 2023 proposed regulations are not supported by data and that heightened capital requirements do not reduce bank lending. The authors warn that failure to align U.S. regulations with the international Basel III standards could start a deregulatory race to the bottom that would undermine global banking stability.
In an article in the University of Illinois Law Review, American University Washington College of Law Professor Hilary Allen explains that financial stability risks can arise from often-overlooked sources beyond the traditional banking sector, such as venture capital. Using the venture capital industry as a case study, Allen contends that speculative sectors such as cryptocurrency can pose risks when regulatory oversight is weak. She argues that effective banking regulation of emerging risks requires a more proactive, systemwide approach, including increased monitoring of risks arising from venture capital investment and more aggressive securities law enforcement against cryptocurrency activities.
In a Stanford Law Review article that predates the GENIUS Act, Gabriel Rauterberg and Jeffrey Zhang argue that shadow banking, including stablecoin issuance, should fall under securities regulators’ oversight. Shadow banking covers a broad range of activities that resemble banking but fall outside the traditionally narrow bank regulatory perimeter and lack banking regulation. As a result, shadow banking receives significantly less regulatory oversight, creating vulnerability and instability in the financial system. The authors contend that many shadow banking activities fall within securities law’s purview and that securities regulation should promote systemic stability by working with traditional bank regulation.
Financial regulation has not kept pace with the financial system’s rapid changes, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Assistant Professor of Finance Yao Zeng asserts in the International Monetary Fund’s Finance & Development quarterly publication. Zeng frames stablecoins as innovative in form but economically familiar in function and financial vulnerability. He argues that although stablecoins promise faster, cheaper, and more accessible payments, their bank-like economic functions and lack of protections such as deposit insurance and lender-of-last-resort support create familiar risks to financial stability. Zeng proposes that regulation should depend more on function than label: if stablecoins perform bank-like monetary functions, they should provide similar safeguards.
In a Delaware Journal of Corporate Law article, Arthur E. Wilmarth argues that the GENIUS Act institutionalizes nonbank stablecoin issuance, a practice that carries severe economic risks and lacks offsetting benefits. Wilmarth contends that nonbank stablecoin issuance undermines traditional banking and allows nonbank entities, such as tech firms, to perform bank-like functions without proper regulatory safeguards. He argues that the resulting ecosystem carries significant risks for financial stability and maintains that stablecoin issuance should be limited to FDIC-insured banks to ensure that adequate protections safeguard depositors’ money.
In a recent article in the Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Roanoke College’s Zane Mullins addresses common critiques of stablecoins and pushes back against the view that stablecoins pose risks to the financial system. Mullins proposes a narrow stablecoin framework that would allow stablecoin issuers to settle payments with common central bank reserves. He argues that this framework would mitigate credit and liquidity risk by giving all stablecoin issuers similar access to a common settlement medium. Mullins contends that the framework would also address interoperability concerns, promote a level playing field among issuers, and mitigate counterparty risk.