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.