Asia Risk Congress 2014 – photogallery

Free-to-view photographs from the Asia Risk Congress 2014

Iosco secretary-general, David Wright, led a global case of regulators in speaking at the tenth annual Asia Risk Congress, which took place at the Four Seasons Hotel in Hong Kong on October 30 in front of an audience of more than 600. Wright used colourful language to highlight the importance of individual qualities in the leaders of the world’s financial institutions, while senior supervisors from the UK, India and Japan described the challenges facing their home markets.

With Basel III’s implementation just months away, banks and service providers have taken significant strides towards establishing an over-the-counter derivatives clearing framework. Other discussions during the day reflected how markets are now being driven more by fundamentals than policy. Charles Firth, head of equities derivatives structuring Asia-Pacific at Credit Suisse, led a panel looking at innovation in equity derivatives – an area which has been fertile ground for new ideas in the past 18 months but which has suffered from patchy liquidity in some of the region’s markets.

The final panel of the day featured a conversation looking at a development that marries both policy and fundamentals: the Hong Kong-Shanghai stock connect. All three panellists were confident that the connect would go ahead but Alexis Garatti, global macroeconomist for Haitong International Securities, warned that politics would always hold sway over economics in the development of the Chinese economy.