data/HSBC_background.txt

HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBC) is a provider of banking and financial solutions. Its
subsidiaries offer retail, business, and commercial banking; private banking, and wealth
management services. The group’s portfolio of offerings comprises personal and
commercial loans, deposit services, mortgages, card products, insurance solutions,
global asset management, working capital and term loans, payment services,
international trade facilitation, merger and acquisition advisory, transaction banking,
capital markets, and risk management, investment management, and trusts and estate
planning, among others. The group has a presence in Europe, Asia, the Middle East,
North Africa, North America, and Latin America. HSBC is headquartered in London, the
UK.

From the Group Chairman
Technology and sustainability are two of the trends transforming banking and the world around us. The opportunities from generative
AI are among the most transformative within my working life. We are actively exploring a number of use cases, while also working to
manage the associated risks.
From Group Chief Executive
Driving cost savings enables us to invest in technology, which is the fourth opportunity. The digitisation of our business continues to
improve customer experience and increase efficiency. Using AI to help price complex structural options in our Foreign Exchange
business has cut execution times down from hours to minutes. We have also identified hundreds of opportunities to leverage
generative AI, and will focus our efforts on use cases with tangible benefits for the Group and our customers.
Innovation also creates new avenues for growth. We recently launched Zing, which is our open market mobile platform focused on
cross-border payments, initially available in the UK. It offers similar capabilities as Global Money does to our international Wealth
and Personal Banking customers, but is targeted at non-HSBC customers and allows us to drive growth beyond our traditional
customer footprint.
From the Strategic Report 2023
HSBC Technology Priority
Digitize
Improve customer experience and efficiency while investing in innovation
In 2023, we made progress on our goal to become a digital-first bank, and our customers have been increasingly adopting our digital
services. In CMB, 83% of customers were digitally active, an increase of 5 percentage points since 2022. Our net promoter score for
onboarding wholesale international clients in the last quarter of 2023 improved by 12 points when compared with the first three
months
of the year. At 54%, more than half of WPB customers were mobile active, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2022.
Furthermore, a total of 75% of WPB’s international customer accounts were opened digitally in 2023, an increase of 30 percentage
points from 2022.
We are also focused on building future-ready business models by investing in open-market propositions. In 2023, we announced a
partnership with Tradeshift to launch a new embedded finance solution in the first half

of 2024, which will provide payment and financial services embedded into trade, e-commerce and marketplace experiences. In
January 2024, in the UK we launched Zing, a mobile platform enabling cross-border payments available to non-HSBC consumers.
We are also investing in innovative technologies for the future. In 2024, we plan to both concentrate our efforts and increase our
investment in artificial intelligence (‘Al’).
At present, we employ Al in areas such as fraud detection and transaction monitoring. We also launched Al Markets, a digital service
that utilises natural language processing to enrich the way investors interact with global markets. Additionally, we are in the process
of piloting numerous generative Al use
cases in areas like developer augmentation, creative content generation and knowledge management, and have identified
hundreds more potential opportunities.