HKFSBCM FORUM
© 2026. All Rights Reserved.
Contact Us
hozefa.badri@hkfsbcm.org
Postal Address
Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong
WISE 2025 was successfully delivered by HKFSBCM and Control Risks on Friday, 14 November 2025 in Hong Kong. The exercise was delivered as an industry-wide tabletop simulation via an online platform, with a central simulation team providing “injects” (e.g., simulated emails, news alerts and social media posts) to prompt Crisis Management Teams (CMTs) to determine and execute appropriate actions without conducting actual physical responses. Each participating firm’s CMT operated within its own established internal crisis response structures, supported by an appointed facilitator to coordinate engagement and provide real-time feedback to exercise control.
HKFSBCM’s WISE is a pioneering industry effort. Hong Kong remains the only global financial hub to bring Operational Resilience and Crisis/Incident Management together in a single, whole‑industry exercise—now delivered for the second time running. This integrated approach goes beyond testing individual firm’s crisis playbooks: it stress-tests the sector’s collective ability to anticipate, respond to, and recover from severe but plausible disruptions, while strengthening shared understanding of interdependencies, decision-making under pressure, and coordinated communications across firms and regulators. In doing so, WISE helps uplift the industry “baseline” and reinforces Hong Kong’s leadership in continuing to build resilience of critical financial services.
The exercise objectives of WISE 2025 included enabling firms to exercise crisis management plans and Crisis Management Teams (CMTs) under pressure, simulating a systemic crisis impacting Hong Kong’s financial services industry, supporting regulatory priorities, and increasing awareness of emerging threats. WISE continues to strengthen crisis preparedness, enhance overall resilience, test procedures, and facilitate best-practice sharing across the sector through a severe but plausible scenario.
The scenario built on an extreme weather event (super typhoon) impacting Hong Kong, triggering widespread disruption including power fluctuations, telecommunications and broadband outages, damage and degradation to data centre services, and flooding and transport disruption. The scenario was designed to create cascading impacts across critical operations, including business services, and incorporated elements such as activation of resilience planning, regulatory reporting, crisis communications, third-party dependencies, and fraudulent activity and cybersecurity issues.
WISE 2025 brought together forty-seven financial services firms (domestic, regional and global banks, asset managers and other financial services firms) and involved regulators including the HKMA and SFC (with the IA and MPFA participating as observers). This was the largest participation in WISE to date, underscoring the financial services industry commitment to operational resilience in Hong Kong.
The HKFSBCM Forum would like to express their sincere appreciation to the HKMA, SFC, IA and MPFA for their support and to HKMA for their invaluable guidance, and to all participating firms for their dedication and collaboration throughout this important initiative.
WISE 2025 Report
(click on the image to download)