The CEIBS International Conference was held alongside the famous Lujiazui Forum on 19 June 2025. The annual Lujiazui Forum is where the Chinese central government outlines its policy objectives for the financial services industry. The CEIB runs it own forum alongside to drill down on practical implementation issues that the country can consider. So foreigners like me are invited to share our thoughts, which I used to outline how a city like Shanghai can transform itself into a financial services technology innovation hub. The organisers were very excited to hear my speech because it was an idea not well developed in Shanghai and they were very interested to hear what I had to say.
I started my speech by outlining how Silicon Valley itself became the innovation hub for the US. I then pointed out that Zhejiang province had some of the similar characteristics as Silicon Valley. The “six little dragons” of Hangzhou (Game Science, Deep Seek, Unitree Robotics, Deep Robotics, BrainCo and Manicore Tech) have an association with Zhejiang University in the same way that Silicon Valley has an association with Stanford University. I postulated that Shanghai has the opportunity to create a financial ecosystem of its own, where tech companies work closely with the finance industry to create future innovations. I know for example, that Huawei and other large Chinese tech giants have been opening up campuses in the Shanghai district, but with very little interaction with the financial services players in the Lujiazui district.
I then went on to outline how innovations and innovative eco-systems come about in the first place. They don’t necessarily happen out of design. In reality, the big shifts in finance—whether the creation of the US Federal Reserve in 1913, or the collapse of Bretton Woods arrangement in 1971—happen in moments of improvisation, in times of great financial distress, in moments of desperation. That’s when the system is willing to move on to another level or make decisions it was not able to when it was not broken.
I then made the case that Shanghai, and China more broadly, must now shift from being a market economy to becoming a networked economy. That’s not just semantics. A market matches buyers and sellers. A network derives value from connectivity. In markets, scale is king. In networks, participation creates worth.
There are many initiatives in areas like tokenised deposits, supply chain finance, and cloud infrastructure. But the deeper challenge is to stop defending legacy systems and start building for speed. Because the next wave of innovations —AI-native platforms, decentralised finance, embedded services—won’t wait for permission from a state-run system. Shanghai will do well to lay the conditions necessary for innovations to flourish, so that when the time comes, it will be ready. Remember you first heard these ideas from me.
