How HKSI Paper 1 compares to other professional exams

Somebody always asks whether Paper 1 is "harder than the CFA". It is not a useful comparison and the honest answer is no, obviously not, by a wide margin - but that framing hides the thing worth knowing, which is that Paper 1 is structurally unusual in a way that catches people who have passed harder exams.

What kind of exam is Paper 1?

One sitting. Ninety minutes. No essays, no case studies, no oral defence, no multi-level progression over years. On raw commitment, this is a small exam. Most people fit it around a full-time job in a couple of months.

Where Paper 1 is easier than the big qualifications

• There is no quantitative content to speak of. No portfolio maths, no discounting, no statistics.
• The whole thing is multiple choice, so you never have to produce an argument in writing.
• Sittings are monthly rather than annual or twice-yearly, so a failure sets you back weeks, not a year.
• It is a single paper, not a sequence of levels with attrition at each one.
• The syllabus is published in full and is finite. Nine topics, 66 second-level headings, and that is the extent of it.

Where it is harder than people expect

The pass mark. Seventy per cent is high for a professional multiple-choice paper, and it is the reason a middling-difficulty exam produces a pass rate near half. Plenty of qualifications set the bar at 50% or 60% and are considered demanding. Paper 1 sets it at 42 of 60 and is considered easy. Only one of those framings survives contact with the published pass rates.

The second thing is jurisdictional specificity. A global qualification tests principles you can reason your way towards. Paper 1 tests Hong Kong's regulatory architecture - which Part of the Ordinance covers licensing, which code governs a fund manager's conduct, what a registered institution is as distinct from a licensed corporation. You cannot deduce any of that. You either read it or you do not know it, and prior finance experience elsewhere transfers poorly.

Why we will not quote other exams' pass rates

Because we cannot verify them to the standard we hold our own numbers to. Our published-figure discipline is that a number appears on this site only if we can point at the body that published it and the date we checked. We have done that for the HKSI rates. Doing it properly for four other awarding bodies is a different piece of work, and quoting half-remembered percentages to make a comparison land would undercut the only thing that makes our pass-rate pages worth reading.

The comparison that actually matters

Not against the CFA. Against your own last exam.

If the last thing you sat was a university finance paper marked at 40% or 50%, recalibrate hard. Paper 1's threshold means that a performance you would previously have called a solid pass is a fail here. That single adjustment is worth more than any cross-qualification league table.

Our opinion: Paper 1 has an undeserved reputation as a formality, and the reputation comes from people comparing its content to heavier qualifications instead of comparing its threshold. Roughly 48.1% of candidates do not pass. Formalities do not do that.

The concession: for someone already working in Hong Kong compliance, Paper 1 genuinely is close to a formality. Most of Topics 1, 5 and 6 are your job description. That group passes comfortably and then tells everyone else the exam is easy, which is how the reputation propagates.

If you are starting from outside the industry, our guide to Paper 1 with no finance background is the more relevant read.