HKSI Paper 1 prep providers compared, including where we fall short

We sell a Paper 1 course, so treat everything below with the scepticism that deserves. What we can offer instead of neutrality is specificity: real options, described by what they are actually good at, with no invented prices and no invented feature lists for anyone but ourselves.

You have probably already looked at two or three of these. A comparison that pretends the alternatives are bad would fall apart the moment you clicked through, so we have not written one.

The official HKSI study manual and mock papers

Start here. The manual is written by the body that sets the paper, against the syllabus the paper is drawn from, and there is no third-party substitute for that relationship. When our explanation of a rule and the manual's disagree, the manual wins.

HKSI also publishes mock papers. Use them late rather than early, because a mock spent before you know the material teaches you almost nothing and burns a scarce resource.

The manual's weakness is structural rather than a criticism of its quality. It is a reference text, and reference texts are read passively. That gap between reading and recall is where a 70% pass mark does its damage, and it is the reason the published mean pass rate over the twelve months to June 2026 was only 51.9%.

Question bank sites

hksipapers.com is the one candidates mention to us most often, and there are others. The value is obvious: repetition against multiple-choice items until the format stops surprising you. That is genuinely useful and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Two things to check on any question bank, ours included. First, whether the material has been updated since the syllabus moved to v3.5. Second, whether each answer comes with a reason you can trace back to the Ordinance or a code, because an answer key without reasoning teaches you the item and not the rule.

Tuition centres

Hong Kong has a real market of classroom and online providers for the licensing examinations. We are not going to name prices, class sizes or pass-rate claims for any of them, because we cannot verify a single one of those figures and repeating them would be exactly the behaviour we are asking you to distrust.

What a tuition centre gives you that no platform can is obligation. You paid, the class is on Tuesday, you will go. For a candidate who has already let two study plans slide, that is worth more than any feature list. Cantonese-medium teaching is also far easier to find in a classroom than online, which matters if you are weighing the English against the Chinese version of the paper.

Employer internal training

If your firm runs it, use it, and use it first. It is free, it is aimed at the licence your compliance team actually needs you to hold, and the person delivering it has watched previous cohorts fail in specific ways.

It also tends to be thin on timed practice, because internal sessions are built around content delivery rather than exam simulation. Pair it with mocks from somewhere.

What we do, and where we are weaker

Our Paper 1 course is 131 questions in total: 66 in practice mode and 65 held back for mocks, across 5 timed forms in the real 60-question, 90-minute shape. Every question carries an explanation that cites the Ordinance Part or the code it comes from. HKD 680 buys 6 months of access, and there is a bundle at HKD 1,180. If you sit the paper and do not pass, your next attempt on our platform is free.

Now the parts that should make you hesitate.

• Where we and the official manual disagree, the manual wins. It is written by the body that sets the paper. We are not.
• We are English only. If you are sitting the Traditional Chinese paper, a Chinese-medium tuition centre will serve you better than we will.
• There is no tutor to ask. An explanation you do not understand stays an explanation you do not understand.
• 131 questions is a bank, not an ocean. Candidates who want thousands of items should combine us with a larger question bank rather than expecting us to be one.
• We are new. We cannot show you a decade of results, and we are not going to invent a pass-rate claim to fill the gap.

What we would actually tell a friend

Buy the official manual. Read it once, properly, without highlighting everything. Then stop reading and start testing, because the gap between the half that passes and the half that does not is almost entirely a testing gap rather than a reading gap.

For the testing part, use whatever gives you explanations rather than just answer letters. That might be us. It might equally be a question bank plus the manual open beside you, which costs less and works fine if you have the discipline to look everything up. We think the explanations are worth paying for. You may reasonably disagree.

One thing we will say without hedging: do not buy a course before you have taken a timed run at the material. Roughly 48.1% of candidates fail this paper and a good share of them bought something. Find out where you stand first, then spend. What the pass rate actually tells you is the page to read before you get out a card.