NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) - Hong Kong's former financial secretary, Mr John Tsang, has joined digital wealth firm StashAway as an adviser and will be giving away part of his soon-to-be issued non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to attract new clients.

Mr Tsang spent more than three decades working in Hong Kong's civil service and ran for Hong Kong's chief executive job in 2017, but lost to Mrs Carrie Lam. He is also a senior adviser at virtual insurance firm Bowtie.

Mr Tsang, 70, said in an interview that after he left the government, he was interested in working with young people and companies with technology platforms that have the potential to "disrupt" a particular industry.

"I think StashAway fits really well into that," he added.

StashAway, a Singapore-based firm founded in 2016, has more than US$1 billion (S$1.36 billion) in assets under management and is backed by investors including Sequoia Capital. The firm started operations in Hong Kong last year and is in talks with local regulators on offering crypto-related products to professional and retail investors.

There is growing interest from wealthy investors in dipping into crypto. According to Campden Wealth, 35 per cent of family offices in Asia-Pacific plan on increasing their allocation to cryptocurrency in the coming year, higher than the global average of 28 per cent. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the city's de facto central bank, plans to have a new regulatory regime for crypto assets ready by July.

"We've had a lot of request about it, especially because a lot of our investors are younger," said Ms Stephanie Leung, a former Goldman Sachs Group trader who heads the firm's Hong Kong operations. "If you look at the older cohorts, they are also interested because of the returns."

In Singapore, StashAway already offers crypto as an add-on product to traditional portfolios. Ms Vivien Khoo, a former managing director responsible for compliance at Goldman Sachs, joined StashAway last year. Ms Khoo was also the interim chief executive for BitMex, a crypto-trading platform.

Mr Tsang will gift some of the 3,000 "Choi Yeah" NFTs he is minting to new StashAway clients who make an investment of at least HK$50,000 (S$8,700) in their first deposit. The name of the NFTs is the Cantonese nickname given to the city's financial secretary and means "God of Fortune".

NFTs are a type of cryptocurrency, but each one is unique and cannot be replaced or replicated. NFTs have exploded in popularity as cryptocurrencies gain mainstream acceptance, but fraud tied to them has also surged. In one recent case in the United States, two men were charged with defrauding investors of more than US$1 million by creating a series of NFTs and abandoning the project after selling out of tokens.

StashAway has about 15 people in Hong Kong and the firm plans to hire more wealth advisers and for customer service.