HKMA and Bank Negara Malaysia start a stablecoin workstream, a week after a QR pact with Bank Indonesia

Implications

Facts

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) and Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) held a high-level bilateral meeting in Hong Kong on 2 October 2026, chaired by HKMA Chief Executive Eddie Yue and BNM Governor Datuk Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour. According to OpenGov Asia and Fintech News Hong Kong, the two central banks agreed to set up a joint policy workstream on compliant cross-border stablecoin use between Hong Kong and Malaysia.

They also agreed to explore enhanced connectivity between their real-time gross settlement (RTGS) systems, wider use of local currencies in bilateral trade and investment, and a possible link between Hong Kong's Central Moneymarkets Unit (CMU) and Malaysia's RENTAS. Other areas include knowledge sharing on the Commercial Data Interchange and CargoX to widen SME trade-finance access, cross-border cyber resilience, anti-scam and anti-fraud cooperation, and Islamic finance. No targets, volumes or timelines were announced.

On 24 September the HKMA and Bank Indonesia signed a memorandum of understanding to explore cross-border QR payment interoperability, also without a go-live date. Bank Indonesia signed an MoU on payment-system cooperation with Banco Central de Timor-Leste on 25 September, under which the two are exploring cross-border QRIS.

Analysis

The two Hong Kong arrangements take different routes into ASEAN. With Indonesia, the starting point is retail payments: linking QR schemes, as Bank Indonesia already does with Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and China and is exploring with Timor-Leste. With Malaysia, the agenda sits at the wholesale and policy level, covering settlement systems, bond-market plumbing and stablecoins, where Hong Kong has its own licensing regime.

For consumer lenders the retail QR route is the more direct one. QR links make it cheaper to send small payments across a corridor, which over time creates the transaction histories lenders use to assess migrant workers and small merchants. A stablecoin workstream is at a much earlier stage: it is a policy study between regulators, not a payment service, and it would need rules on redemption, AML and consumer protection in both jurisdictions before any lender could use it.

Counterpoints and uncertainties

MoUs and workstreams create no obligation to launch, and neither the QR link nor the stablecoin work has a go-live date. Stablecoin use across borders depends on rules in both jurisdictions, and Malaysia's would have to sit alongside Hong Kong's licensing regime. The trade-data and fraud cooperation may matter more to banks than the headline stablecoin item.