Bill Winters, CEO of Standard Chartered, foresees a future in which nearly all global transactions are conducted on a digital blockchain ledger, he told a crowd in Hong Kong on Monday, as crypto adoption amongst mainstream banking and finance institutions grows. 

“Our belief, which I think is shared by the leadership of Hong Kong, is that pretty much all transactions will settle on blockchains eventually, and that all money will be digital,” the UK-based multinational bank’s CEO said during a panel at Hong Kong FinTech Week. 

“Think about what that means: a complete rewiring of the financial system,” he said, adding that experimentation is required to determine what that rewiring looks like. 

Standard Chartered — which is listed in both London and Hong Kong — has been ramping up its involvement with digital assets in recent years, including through digital asset custody services, trading platforms, and tokenized products. 

Winters made the comments while discussing Hong Kong’s role in the global digital assets space, crediting the city for leadership on experimentation and regulation, alongside Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan. 

Hong Kong has been working to establish itself as a regional crypto hub through a digital asset licensing regime, as well as tokenization pilots in which Standard Chartered is a participant.

A tokenized asset is a digital representation of a real-world asset, like stocks, bonds, or commodities, that can be recorded and traded on a blockchain or distributed ledger. Stablecoins, which are pegged to a currency, are often held up as an early example of a tradable tokenized asset.

Standard Chartered, in partnership with blockchain venture capital firm Animoca Brands and telecommunications company HKT, is planning to launch a Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin under a new regulatory framework the city launched in August.

Winters said Monday he believed that Hong Kong dollar stablecoins can represent an interesting new medium of exchange for international trade on digital terms.

Other global fintech leaders have also made bullish predictions for tokenized assets in recent months.

Robinhood Markets CEO Vlad Tenev said last month that tokenization was a “freight train,” coming to most major markets in the next five years.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, said in April that every asset from stocks to bonds to real estate can be tokenized in what will represent a “revolution” for investing.

Traders who shorted the S&P 500 — essentially, betting that it would go down — last month were in for a rude surprise. The broad-based index ended the month 2.3% higher, defying “Octoberphobia,” a term that arose because of the market crashes in 1929 and 1987 that happened during the month.

The Nasdaq Composite had an even better month than the S&P 500. The tech-heavy index climbed 4.7%, giving a hint of what helped ward off the arrival of any ill omens: the technology sector.

On Friday, Amazon shares popped 9.6% on robust growth in its cloud-computing unit and as CEO Andy Jassy pointed to “strong demand in AI and core infrastructure.” The news pushed up other artificial intelligence-related stocks such as Palantir and Oracle too.

AI’s ascent in the market wasn’t a one-day event. In October, Nvidia, the poster child of AI, became the first company to reach a valuation of $5 trillion, with CEO Jensen Huang describing the technology as having formed a “virtuous cycle” in which usage growth will lead to an increase in investment, in turn improving AI, which will boost usage, which will… You get the idea.

Indeed, during their earnings disclosures last week, Big Tech companies announced dizzying increases in their capital expenditure, most of which will likely go toward AI infrastructure.

All that is to say that the enthusiasm over AI looks, for now, less like the immediate sugar rush of a candy bar (and the subsequent crash), and more like the sustained energy boost from a fiber-rich pumpkin.

China’s factory activity slows down in October. The RatingDog China General Manufacturing PMI, compiled by S&P Global, came in at 50.6 for the month, dipping from the six-month high of 51.2 in September. Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting a reading of 50.9.

Baidu’s weekly robotaxi rides hit 250,000. That’s according to a spokesperson for Apollo Go, Baidu’s robotaxi unit, who said the firm surpassed that figure as of Oct. 31. It’s roughly the same number of weekly driverless rides as Waymo, according to report in late April.

Berkshire Hathaway operating profit rebounds. Year on year, that figure surged 34% to $13.485 billion in the third quarter. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate now holds $381.6 billion in cash, the highest on record — but it isn’t looking at stock buybacks yet.

U.S. markets ended Friday higher. On Sunday night stateside, futures tied to major U.S. indexes were little changed. Asia-Pacific markets rose Monday. Japan’s Nikkei 225 and South Korea’s Kospi were up more than 2%, as of 2 p.m. Singapore time (1 a.m. ET).

[PRO] Stocks enter November on a high. The S&P 500 is beginning November more than 16% up for the year. This week, investors should still keep an eye out for a Supreme Court case on Trump tariffs and earnings from firms like Advanced Micro Devices and Palantir.

BEIJING — As Baidu ramps up its robotaxi operations worldwide, fully driverless weekly rides as of Oct. 31 have now surpassed 250,000 orders, according to a spokesperson for the company’s driverless car unit Apollo Go.

That’s on par with what Waymo reported in late April for its weekly paid U.S. rides. When contacted by CNBC, Waymo did not have a new specific figure to share. The Alphabet-backed robotaxi operator primarily operates in San Francisco and Los Angeles in California and Phoenix, Arizona. Waymo partners with Uber in Austin and Atlanta.

The ramp up in Baidu’s robotaxi capabilities comes as Chinese and U.S. companies have been competing for leadership in advanced technology, including artificial intelligence, electric cars and autonomous driving.

It was not clear for how long Apollo Go has been operating 250,000 rides a week. For the quarter ended June 30, the company averaged about 169,000 rides a week based on CNBC calculations of the 2.2 million fully driverless robotaxi rides disclosed for the period.

Baidu’s Apollo Go primarily operates robotaxis in Wuhan and parts of Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen in mainland China. The company is also expanding to Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and, most recently, Switzerland. Robotaxis typically must undergo phases of public testing before local regulators allow companies to charge fares.

Apollo Go said it has received 17 million robotaxi ride orders to date, and that its cars have driven 240 million kilometers (149 miles), with 140 million fully driverless rides.

On safety, Apollo Go disclosed on average there has been one airbag deployment incident for every 10.1 million kilometers driven, but so far there’s has not been any major accident involving human injury or death.

Baidu is scheduled to next release its quarterly results on Nov. 18 before U.S. market open. The company is set to hold its annual tech conference in Beijing on Nov. 13.

Weekly robotaxi figures from Chinese rivals Pony.ai and WeRide were not immediately available. Waymo did not immediately respond to a request for an update to the figures shared in April.