EY’s David Chen: Demand for better digital experiences fuels new wave of transformation in Hong Kong

For him, the success of these transformation strategies depends on enriching customer experience, improving efficiency, and enhancing employee satisfaction.

Hong Kong's technology industry continued to expand in 2025, driven by strong government investment in innovation, research, and digital transformation. Artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, played a key role in this growth, with increasing use across industries such as finance, healthcare, logistics, and public services.

Government initiatives, startup funding, and innovation hubs supported entrepreneurship and technological advancement, whilst collaboration with the Greater Bay Area strengthened access to larger markets and research opportunities. Although the industry faced challenges with a shortage of skilled talent, growing regional competition, and geopolitical uncertainties, the region maintained its leading position in the industry.

Against this backdrop, David Chen currently serves as EY’s Partner in Technology Consulting. In his role, he leads the firm’s Emerging Technology and Technology Transformation competencies for the financial services sector in Hong Kong and also serves as its Microsoft Alliance Lead in Greater China.

With over 25 years of experience in the financial services industry across insurance, banking, and wealth & asset management, Chen has taken the lead in large digital transformation programmes across Asia-Pacific, from strategy formation to execution and adoption of innovative technology for clients in the region.

As one of the judges for the 2026 iteration of the Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards, Chen shares his insights on the current state, key drivers, strategic priorities, and future opportunities of digital transformation, technology, AI, and innovation for businesses in Hong Kong and the broader Asia-Pacific region.

How would you describe the current state of digital transformation across Hong Kong’s business landscape?

I would say digital transformation across Hong Kong’s business landscape is alive and well. Fuelled by AI and changes in customers’ expectations, the demand for better digitised interactions and improvements in doing business is creating a new wave of digital transformation initiatives in HK.

From your experience leading large-scale transformation programmes, what are the most important elements of a successful technology strategy?

The most important measure of a technology strategy’s success is whether it can uplift the return on investment (ROI). This can be measured by factors such as enriching customer experience, improving operational efficiency, and enhancing employee satisfaction. But, at the end of the day, the measure of a successful technology strategy comes down to whether it helped generate revenue and uplift profit margin over a set horizon.

In order to achieve this, many factors are at play, including prioritising the right initiatives and clearly understanding the problem you are trying to solve. For example, is the problem at a sufficient scale to generate the necessary returns through volume, or does it address your biggest customer complaints? Most importantly, do you have the right team, governance, and technology in place to implement the solution and effectively execute the strategy? Most strategies fail due to poor execution.

What technology trends are having the greatest impact on organisations in Hong Kong and the broader Asia-Pacific region?

It’s hard not to say AI. After COVID, many thought “automation” would die down and there wouldn’t be an uplift in the use of technology. However, in the last couple of years, AI has been a hot topic. Generative AI kicked off the resurgence in AI discussions because consumers could easily feel its impact and value add in their daily lives; however, other forms of AI (e.g. Agentic AI) have come up since and represent the next wave of technology trends. I see adoption of AI is still in its infancy, and there are many things we can use AI for, especially in organisation-wide use cases, not just in silo areas.

What strategies should organisations adopt to maximise returns from AI and data investments?

I see two different types of organisations adopting AI.

Those organisations that fully centralise AI and need to get every use case perfect before they move forward with it. Such firms, I think, are not taking advantage of AI technology fast enough. 

The other organisations are those that fully decentralise AI to every department. With such organisations, they are hitting a lot of AI use cases; however, they may not be achieving enough synergy between departments and maximising their cost base. There will be a time soon when the cost of ever-increasing tokens gets shifted from major AI vendors to the consumers. Right now, the token cost (fuelled also by rising RAM costs) is being shielded from consumers as investment money is coming in to get AI adoption up, but there will be a point in time when the investment funding ends, and token cost will get channelled back to consumers. That is when we will ration out the real useful AI cases versus the ones that are not a priority.

In any case, the right level of AI strategy is needed for any organisation to take AI forward, whether it’s to do with ROI calculation, governance & ringfencing, choice of tools, choice of LLMs, and how teams are equipped to deploy AI successfully.  

What opportunities do you see for Hong Kong businesses in the next generation of digital innovation?

For financial service companies, digital assets will be the next frontier. Digital assets will spawn a new set of digital innovation items related to on-chain activities that will need to be handled by different technologies. Use cases are now coming up for the use of digital assets such as Smart Contracts, Cheaper Foreign Currency movement via StableCoins, Liquidity Management use cases via Tokenisation, etc., which a lot of financial service companies will need to pay attention to.

If not specific to a sector, I think ecosystem partnerships are still something that hasn’t completely opened up in HK and where the next wave of digital innovation will come about. Being able to link to different services seamlessly is still done sporadically. This may not be new technology,, but it's about how data can be shared more easily between organisations that have a mutual interest in specific customers. Aggregator solutions, I think, will play a vital role next.

As a judge at the Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards 2026, how would you distinguish a transformative technology implementation amongst the nominees?

Like the years before, I am looking to distinguish the nominees based on how they solve real-world problems. Whether it’s for the business or consumer in a transformative way, and how they can use innovative technology to achieve this.