Can you take us through how this all came together and what the key drivers were behind the conversations?

Yeah, well, it goes back a number of years.

And Hong Kong has always had a fairly good fund exemption regime to promote Hong Kong as an asset management hub and to attract asset managers to Hong Kong.

And the fund regime has been pretty good, but it hasn't been perfect.

And we will all know how the industry has evolved over the years and continues to evolve when it comes to strategies and trading activity in particular.

And whilst our fund exemption regime may have been okay for certain types of funds, for example, retail funds, traditional funds, and even some private equity funds, but there were a number of other alternative strategies which didn't fit neatly within our exemption.

And that created a lot of uncertainty.

But I imagine there'll be listeners out there that will be trying to conceptualize what these reforms mean in terms of the economics for asset managers and senior professionals in Hong Kong? So could you just give us a concrete example to just put this into the real world for us?

Tom highlighted some of them, but in your own words, could you just help lay out what those pressures are, both in terms of geopolitical and the economic pressures internationally, just to give listeners that may not be familiar with the market?

Yeah, no, thanks, Drew.

And, you know, it does seem like a long time ago now.

But, yeah, you're right.

I mean, we would acknowledge that there was a period where Hong Kong faced, you know, a number of challenges.

You know, some of our listeners would certainly recall the social unrest which we had back in 2019.

And then that sort of led into the outbreak of COVID-19.

Can you take us through how this all came together and what the key drivers were behind the conversations?