San Francisco-based Social Finance has acquired Hong Kong mobile investing startup 8 Securities, underlining that the city was «ripe for innovation».

Social Finance has acquired 8 Securities, according to a «Bloomberg» report citing a company statement, rebranding the business to SoFi Hong Kong. SoFi will also be «the only brokerage service that delivers fee-free stock trading on more than 15,000 US and Hong Kong stocks, as well as exchange-traded funds».

«We underwent an extensive process in considering our initial expansion into an international market, and it quickly became clear that Hong Kong, a financial capital of Asia, is ripe for innovation,» said Anthony Noto, CEO and former executive with Twitter.

SoFi was founded in 2011 as a student lending service and has since expanded into a myriad of other financial services and achieved a $4.3 billion valuation after raising more than $500 million in May last year.