 May I introduce Charles Lee, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Exchange and Clearing. You're running one of the most innovative exchanges on the planet. You're consistently leading in terms of IPOs. You're innovating in terms of startups, particularly in the biotech space, that you list on your exchange and you're continuously attracting foreign listings as well. You're previously with JP Morgan, Chair of China, and you're trained as a journalist and lawyer, I believe. Jessica Tan, you are co-CEO of Ping An Insurance, one of the largest, if not the largest insurance company in the world with close to a trillion in assets. You also chair the technology arm where you're significantly investing in technological innovation and you have, I believe, 500 million online users on your platforms. So let me kick it off with a couple of questions to get us started. And then I will let you have the floor. So Jessica, in your opinion, what is the biggest barrier that leaders will need to overcome and the habits that they will need to cultivate in this new era of globalization? And Charles, what are some of the steps that you have taken recently to recalibrate and steer your organization in this new area of globalization? Please, the floor is yours. So hi, everyone. I'll start off first, Charles, being the gentleman here. So my name is Jessica Tan, as was introduced, Ping An, maybe a little bit about Ping An. We are one of the largest insurance company. And then from insurance, we banked into various financial services, banking investment area. And in the past 10 years, we've just been zilious in investing in technology. What's unique about us is that we invest in the technology not just for ourselves, but we've incubated 11 tech companies over the past 10 years. The combined valuation is more than, I think, 70 billion US dollars, the last count, which is about more than a third of our market valuation. And the way we think about these technology, just give me a sec, does this work? Yeah. Okay. And what's unique about us, I think, in investing in these technologies is that we do not just for ourselves, but we serve the market. So we have a fintech company that serves over 600 banks, 72 insurers in the market. We have health tech companies that serves over 3,000 hospitals. And we have smart city companies that serves over 100 cities in China. So I think that's kind of the graph of where we are. And then to answer the question that's the kickoff, I think one of the things that personally, as I think about, is in this globalization 4.0, when you think about leaders, either as companies or as individuals, one of the most difficult problem I see is that how do you cross barrier? I mean, we talked a lot about digital economy. You see a lot of these breakouts sharing how these platforms, the lines are blurring, lines are blurring between offline and online. Lines are blurring between traditional sector definition. And so how do you think about being able to go across that? And I think this requires something that is inherent in all of us, but yet as individuals or organizations, you get out of your comfort zone in an area that you don't know about. And I think that often is something that we have to overcome. I run many of our technology innovation group. We grew from about 3,000 developers 10 years ago to now 30,000 developers and 99,000 technologists in our companies. And one of the things that we constantly have to do is then how do you bring people from different disciplines? I think Charles is a great example. I knew about his law degree, I didn't know about his journalism, you know, is how about you bring, because you're trying to solve a problem. I mean, I was just at a healthcare breakout session, right? How do you bring people with healthcare, with technology, with maybe kind of social studies type of experience together to solve a problem? And that requires a very different type of skills being able to acknowledge that you don't really know some of the areas. Having an embracing and open collaborative environment, which is ironic these days, at the micro level, it's also at the organization level. And I think that for me is the key on how you can scale many of these innovations together. Yeah, I think, you know, we just published our three-year strategic plan. When we look at our business, look at our market, we just felt that probably in the next decade, the biggest thing in our career is really how China is going to interact with the rest of the world. That's really the largest pool of capital that is yet captive within its own borders. And it's difficult for others to go in, and it's difficult for their capital to come out. But we also know that's the second largest equity market, third largest bond market. In that, inevitably, it has to really find ways to connect. But increasingly, it's becoming very difficult politically, economically. But it's even technologically. So China, in terms of Chinese money, accessing into international goods or products, in terms of global money, accessing into Chinese underlying and Chinese goods. So that for big customers, how do they interact over time with capital control, with the Sino-US conflict? That's a very big thing for us to figure out a way for that connection to take place. But increasingly, we are also challenged by another very big divide. That is, the technology has really made the Asian market, China market fundamentally different from the Western market. Western market is still a very heavily intermediated market. It was big banks, broker-dealers, insurance companies, a lot of the financial institutions before we come to the consumers. But the Chinese market are heavily and disintermediated already, both in terms of the capital market run by the state. It's all 100 million people open accounts directly with the clearinghouse and with the CCP. And you have the Ping An, the Alibaba, the Tennessee Institute essentially flattened the entire economic and financial services landscape. So it's all into the C-terminal. So when we, as an exchange, looking at this big trend, this too big divide, we all know they need to talk, but they no longer can talk. So as an exchange, how do we find a way to make everything work? To make the connection work? Make the round pipes connected with that square pipes? Because the voltages are no longer the same. And not only between China and the US and the West, but it's also between China is heavily technologically advanced in terms of the structure, in terms of the hardware, in terms of software. The disintermediation also means the chemical enrichment in that market is pretty much deprived right now. But with the heavily intermediate pyramid market globally, everybody's trying to do MIFI-2, which is really a disclosure system, but China's already MIFI-10. So how do we really make this two system is really what we are looking at. We historically, as an exchange, our job is easy. We basically like a pack of wolves traveling on the snow. The strong wolves are heading at the front, trying to open roads, trying to find new directions. But the weak, the elder, are all in the middle and towards the end. We, as an exchange, is at the rear. We're the strongest wolf as a rear guard because we have to move with the market. We can't afford to let people just to drop off and die. But that sometimes becomes an excuse for exchanges to be very backward, to be moving at the pace of the slowest member. Today, we want to make sure that not only we are leading, but we are also bringing the rare and sometimes have to really make tough choices that we are not going to let everybody to go with the pace. Some people may not be able to be at the same pace and if we, with a lot of efforts, they may have to be left out. We need to move that pack along. But now this pack has two camps, four camps, China, international, just an independent model and a heavily pyramid model. And how these four things can ultimately work is how we look at leadership. Because exchange is a unique organization that are able to bring everybody together. And in that connection, we have a lot to work with P9. So I want to ask Jessica because I look at Ping An with a tremendous amount of interest because they have their hands everywhere. They're in insurance, they're in bank, they're in broker-dealer, they're in technology, they're in commodities, they're in exchange trading, they're in P2P financing. So how do you look at all the different sectors and how do you make decisions as a leader both internally but also Ping An as a leader of the industry? How do you make decisions where you become a competitor, where you become a platform developer, where you become a technology provider, or where you just simply open for competition? I think, so firstly, Charles and I know each other. So we can go on for hours if we want to talk. I think it's interesting questions. When we become really big, as Charles said, we are very big. Not only we manage a trillion US dollars, we have 1.8 million people working for us and coming from Singapore. That's a lot of people. So one of the things I think we think about constantly, what to do or not to do, you have to go back down to what your mission statement is. If you look at our mission, we are a retail company. 87.5% of our profits come from retail. So we care about our individuals. And we believe that we want to provide leading financial services embedded into their lifestyle. I think that's how we see it. We see financial services as a conduit to what they really want. So the things that we do besides our core financial services businesses and our technology, I mentioned that we have 11 businesses, we chose five areas that we think are fundamental, not just to the GDP, economic development, but also to the individuals. So these are things, so financial services definitely is one. Health is definitely one. Everyone cares about health. Car and in Asia, everybody wants a car. So automobile, housing, and a smart city, because a lot of this urbanization trend is going to continue and all our lives revolve around the city. So these are five areas that we believe are important for the country as well as for individuals. And then the question is then how? How do we actually get involved in this ecosystem, which are very huge ecosystems itself, and make ourselves relevant? Where's our value at? And we've gone through over the 10 years back and forth in many different models. I think what we realize is that where our key is our expertise knowledge in being able to bridge various things together. And I'll give a health care example. If you look at the health care exam, many people will think that the whole ecosystem, we divide that into three parts of the ecosystem. That's the patient themselves, the providers, and then the payer who's going to pay for it. In many countries, it's either the insurance who pay for it, the government who pay for it, out of pocket you pay for it. And for each of these areas, our DNA is a little bit different. So firstly, we are definitely strongest in the payer because we are the largest health insurance in China. So not only do we do ourselves, but then we realize that 55% of the health care expenditure in China is paid for by the government. And we need to first have a better handle on the cost. So 10 years ago, we incubated the company, social health insurance tech company that primarily serves the government in terms of how they would administer the right health care costs just like what an insurance would do. That gives you a good idea of what the kind of diagnostic standard are and whether the costs are. The second thing we need to do is then on the patients, you need to be influenced, a lot of us in the health care sector, you need to influence how the decisions are being made by all of us. Every day we have lots of illnesses and then what will we do? So six years ago, we created a company, Good Doctor, actually listed on Hong Kong Exchange proudly, whereby we realized the primary care provision in China is inconsistent quality, and therefore we created this online telemedicine. We have over 1,000 doctors. We have now 250 million people on our app. Every day we have 550,000 people who are asking our doctors about various diagnostics because we want to start developing a habit, whereby I think these days, if you want to know, you don't need to go to hospitals, line up for three hours, and you can ask our qualified doctors. Five years ago, it was completely manual. Today 75% is actually answered by AI assistant robot. So I think that's the kind of trend we want to start making the right choices up front when you have a question. And then the third part of the ecosystem is then the actual delivery of health care. Now we are not in the business of running hospitals and stuff, and here our advantage is really technology. So we have a health tech company that serves primarily the 3,000 hospitals, anywhere from AI medical imaging to clinical decision support system to help improve the consistent level of delivery for by the practitioners on the ground. And I think this is an example of how I think we try to think of ourselves from first insurance and a health tech company on how do we play a more integral role in the entire ecosystem, right? This is a big industry, right? Biotech is one of the areas that you talked about, and we find areas where we're strong in, right? Where by we know we have a good balance on cost, right? So that it's not just about efficiency, it's about quality of care. You don't have over-medication. We know that we need to start being able to influence the people to make the decisions, and now technology to improve the level of the division. And then the rest, we collaborate. So that maybe is how we do it. So this is my turn to kind of quiz them on stuff. And it's interesting, I mean, Charles spoke just now also this morning and now press conference about connecting the two systems, right? And this is clearly a hot topic between how two kind of systems are so fundamentally different, right? And you talk about the square pipes and the round pipes. You know, practically, how do you think that sometimes things that are seemingly irreconcilable, right? How do you think that you can practically make this work together? And would you wish that the rest of the people could do a little bit more or to help with that cost? Because I think everyone would love to see, you know, be able to connect the two systems much more effectively together. Yes, I think, you know, Ping An is the perfect client for Exchange because they represent what we do in the past. They represent what we're doing today and they're representing what we might be doing into the future. So I think in the past, you know, Exchange typically monopoly, typically lazy. So in the past, we're sitting in Hong Kong, waiting for them to come to list. And then they just come to list and then international investors come to Hong Kong making investments. We are a great monopoly and we treat them with a lot of money and that was pretty much a great future, a great life for many, many years. And they were a big client, Ping An, you know, becoming a very big investor, also Ping An listed in the Hong Kong Exchange. But then what we're doing today is this two-market China in the world are very, very different. Today, for example, Ping An is already the largest investor, you know, single shareholder of HSBC. But they can't really buy HSBC by moving all the money out of China because of due and the capital control. They did it through what we call stock connect. Stock connect is what we're doing today. Essentially today, we're very realizing the market is so different than we created this market, you know, connect because China can take people in or people can come out but they cannot really allow a large scale of that to happen. So instead, we come up with the stock connect. Essentially a bond connect. Essentially people in Hong Kong are buying everything into China electronically but every day they're subtle and clear with Hong Kong clear. Conversely, everybody in China today are buying the Hong Kong market by buying electronically but they settle unclear with China clear. So every day, you know, I clear with all the international investors buy and sell net it out at eight o'clock at night. I'm the only guy who carry a batch of money and China clear carry a bag of money. We meet on the Shenzhen Bridge and that's the only money that exchanges on that day. Everybody is buying the in and out but every day there's only one amount of money. So over the last five years of stock connect only a hundred billion RMMB moved north into China created a trillion market cap of owning each other and supported by about 10 trillion in trading volume. So that's sort of essentially using the exchange to bridge the differences of the two markets that nobody needs to change in order to go into China and nobody needs to change in order to come out of China. So that's what we're doing today. That's really how we connect because we allow the market to do what they do. So that's really a huge progress but we look at them all the stuff they're doing particularly on the technology front is into the future because our market, the capital market is heavily intermediated. The exchange is at the top broker dealers are the members the clients are behind them. That's the pyramid. China is already flat. Everybody open accounts. China is almost like a very clean water tank of small fish. Big fish are not allowed to eat a small fish. So it's very clean. It's very easy to regulate. Our market is slightly muddy but on the other hand it's highly efficient in different ways. So how this two market is going to interact is something that we essentially trying to answer but their future they're doing so much into the future. So we're working with Ping An we're working with Alibaba Tennessee and many big technology giants. Why? Because I know my business is a dinosaur business and I know everything ultimately is going to be flat. Everybody is on the consumer's C2C side. We are the B2B market. They're digging my grave. So I want to join the digging because when I join the digging I know where the hoe is. I know how deep it is. I put a nice comfortable bed in there and I will survive still in there. So can you tell me what are the big grave holes that you're digging for me? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Well, actually Chang's example of the stock conduct is an excellent example. Before I respond to his question because I think a lot of times conceptually something sounds good but in just that simple idea of stock conduct took years, years, actually, I mean Charles is actually not talking about actually the amount of effort he took personally to champion and convince both sides to do it. And I think that really is such a simple idea and frankly, beautiful idea, beautiful idea how you can respect the rules of both systems yet be able to bring in and we are one of the beneficiary. So I would just urge that I think there's so much more that can be done, but a lot of details need to work and can be worked out. I think back to the question on what are holes and stuff. I think many of us are from, I mean insurance is a very traditional industry, if you will. And I think 10 years ago, one of the reasons that spurred us to do this is that we see so many things happening on the technology front, right? This morning I said we as consumers really has completely disrupted our lives, right? My daughter's lived in the whole world whereby she only knows how to do this with a phone. I was, we were still doing the dialing thing. And businesses, we are still decades old. And I really feel passionate about this. I mean, I was a McKinsey partner, so I was 13 years old, all sorts of companies, many large companies which have the most potential actually to do good on a wider scale. We have antiquated processes. We're still struggling the same problems, you know, for decades, right? I talked about SME financing. I talked about the healthcare, et cetera. There's never enough doctors, right? But since there's people and there's a profession called doctors, there's never been enough doctors. And yet how do you actually bring that? And so we were a sense of crisis of what all these disruption could do to us, right? And you can see this intermediation. I think retail industry was one of the first ones that was being disrupted. And you know, could it also happen to us? And if we should embrace it to do it, right? One of the early projects I did when I was a young business analyst in McKinsey kind of really shaped me because I joined at that time in the States right after the dot-com boom, right? And I had the pleasure of doing one of those cost-cutting studies, you know, whereby, you know, this, it was all telecoms company. They were really disrupted by at that time a lot of mobiles that was coming out. And we were brought in to try and see, you know, what we could do to stop their cash flow burn and stuff, right? And I remember as a young analyst, I was responsible for, I still remember 230 art people that I have to analyze and decide who stays, who goes, right? And it was a terrible experience. I never ever wanted to do that ever again. And I think it comes, but I did have one realization, which is that people will only do well if the company does well. The company will only do well if the sector does well, right? The market, we are all symbiotic in some sense. If we come to a point whereby we have to decide, you know, whether a person goes or not go, I think, you know, it becomes that basically they've been, that organization has been asleep for at least 10 years, right? And so I think they're, you know, we have to constantly think about reinventing ourselves, right, to constantly do better and better because everybody else is doing better. I mean, you have to, it's about value creationist. I think that creates a sense of purpose, right? Challenging ourselves whether we can always do better and into a question, you know, financial services are actually intermediaries, right? So it's exchange, actually. We are both in the business of intermediating in a role whereby, you know, created over 100 years ago, right? There's not about information and therefore you have these brokers and stuff. Financial services are no different, right? And then if you look at things like blockchain and stuff, you know, and you take that to the extreme, right? We completely decentralize. We're irrelevant in some sense, right? And I think that spurs us to think, of course, there's not going to happen immediately because it still took hundreds of years to build certain trust and stuff, right? If you look at what's happening in the PDP industry, et cetera, there is still some specialization involved. But I think we need to, like Charles, we feel a strong thing that we start to create these in-between platforms, right? Platforms that can connect the end participants much more, right, so that they can share information much better, us providing more value-added services and those specializations on how to interpret the data. Because data is just, I'm a scientist by training, it's just raw stuff, right? How you interpret the same information is different, right? And I think what we can do is to take our years, decades of experience in there and take that raw information to process and to kind of value-added in the financial services and these will be risk-rating, right? A little bit higher than that. And then make the information better so that, you know, you can connect to it. And I see this as maybe an intermediate solution to bridge the two different worlds of completely decentralized and one that was a much more per-middle what Charles was saying. So I think that's kind of how we'll see this. But coming back, you know, because we have a few minutes left, I was just intrigued and I wanted to ask Charles as given his very interesting two degrees that he saw. You know, today amongst our eight co-chairs, I don't remember recall, actually three of them spoke about impact on people. Right, you know, and how technology as we talked about transform businesses, but also about people. I was shocked by some of the things that people said about 47%, I think of the U.S. kind of being on contract, right? New graduates being on contract staff, right? And we talked about youth unemployment stuff and this reskilling. I mean, what's your view on what it takes then on the workforce, the people, knowing kind of this is where our economy and industry is going, right? And any views on that? I think you speak, that question, ultimately is an issue about leadership and communication. And I think, you know, coming back to the central theme of today is leadership. The leadership, the key is to trying to make, find a simple way to explain things so that people actually at least buy into the vision, understand what you're talking about here. Because it's very easy to be driven by your, kind of our own sense of righteousness. Going back to the example of the Chinese system, which is a flat system, which is in China today, if a stock goes up 30%, the regulator there can instantaneously tell who is trading that stock, is able to immediately block that trade and freeze the accounts because everything is a pre-ID system, a hundred million ID. Vis-a-vis the U.S. and the Western market, which is a pyramid. If a stock goes up 30%, people call me up saying, who is doing what? I don't really know. I only know Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan, everybody's trading. Could be one guy who opened 20 account trading. It take a while for us to find out. With that two system, everybody's arguing which one is better. If you, the Chinese are saying, we want to open, but you need to change the way you need to, you know, really follow our system. The internationalism, we want to go into China, but we really can't take your system because it's so different. So with that kind of a differences, how to explain to people the difference? I think, you know, so that people understand that there are ways to appreciate the strengths of the other market. So for example, you know, you tend to say, oh, China market is very flat, very nice, very easy to regulate, but on the other hand, there's no life in there anymore. It's all small fish with steel water, very clean, but there's no nutrition in the water. Here they're saying, oh, you are very good, but you're muddy and big catfish down there. You don't know what's going on down there. So how to find a way? You know, in some ways, China market is very efficient regulatorily, but in other ways, risk management, I think we have issues. It's almost, you can think of China's market, you know, in the US market, in European market, it's almost like if you've been to New York City, on the New Year's Eve, the big Apple jobs, the 300,000 people down there celebrating every year. They're all drunk most of the time, you know, by one o'clock. There is never any stampede. Everything is pretty safe. Why? Because they do its circles. Every police put the circles, only 300 people in there, and then another circle, another circle, another circle. That's like a Goldman Sachs Morgan Stanley and Marilyn Lynch financial system. In China, a million people are dancing in Tiananmen Square, and everybody's fine, everybody can go through the order, but if somebody say something on the west side of the square is very interesting, let's go there, and somebody fell, you could have a very serious stampede, like what happened in 2015. So two system, very different, we need to find a way to make them work with each other. And Hong Kong is a small place, but we want to play a big role, and we're in the connect. Thank you. Thank you very much, both of you, for your insights. Oh plus, you're gonna pay us as moderators here. Welcome back any time. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have to clear the room for the next session, and I think you... That was a lot of fun. Perfect, perfect. Thank you.