The bank is setting up its first global AI centre of excellence in Singapore
[SINGAPORE] Financial services giant HSBC is on the lookout for more than 100 artificial intelligence specialists for its first global AI centre of excellence that it is setting up in Singapore later this year.
In a news release on Monday (Jul 27), HSBC announced that this AI centre of excellence will work with teams in wealth management and global payments solutions, together with London-based chief AI officer David Rice, who was appointed earlier this year.
For wealth management, this involves AI-enabled wealth journeys and AI portfolio builders. In the global payments space, HSBC will develop agentic solutions for corporate treasurers and AI-enabled e-commerce payments.
Eventually, the plan is for the Singapore-built tools to be used across HSBC’s global network.
The focus areas will include natural language processing, data science, AI governance and human-centred design. HSBC is also looking to hire AI-fluent business specialists.
HSBC said it will be partnering Singapore’s educational institutions and government bodies, with a focus on building a pipeline of talent. Even as some observers have raised concerns that new graduates face challenges in landing tech roles, the bank told *The Business Times *that it will be teaming up with universities to train and deploy fresh talent.
In Singapore, HSBC has more than 3,600 employees.
In addition, HSBC will add 100 relationship manager roles across premier and private banking over the next two years in Singapore, the better to woo affluent and ultra-high-net-worth customers.
The bank also told BT that it will continue to invest in training; for example, through its wealth academy programme in partnership with the London Business School.
Across the entire HSBC group in FY2025 were more than 5,000 wealth relationship managers and product specialists.
HSBC group CEO Georges Elhedery said that Singapore “plays a fundamental role in our growth and leadership position in Asia”.
He added: “Singapore’s strong talent and dynamic ecosystem will help drive our global AI vision – to empower our colleagues to use AI to create a personalised experience for each customer, deliver it safely, in real time and at scale, while keeping human judgement, decision-making and accountability at the core.”
HSBC Singapore CEO Wong Kee Joo said the expansion “reflects our confidence in the country’s future as a leading wealth, trade and innovation hub”.
“It also reinforces HSBC Singapore’s role as a platform for building capabilities that can serve customers locally and scale across our global network,” Wong added.
He expanded further on the three strategic areas for the bank which he sees as being aligned with Singapore’s Economic Strategy Review’s aim to position the country as a focal point for AI, trade and investment.
He told BT: “One is about strengthening Singapore’s role as a connected and trusted hub, as we see many investments going into Asean using Singapore as the launch pad. Secondly, it is about fostering a more dynamic enterprise ecosystem, to enable more Singapore-based companies to scale and succeed globally.”
Thirdly, Wong added, HSBC will see how it can achieve global leadership in its areas of strength.
Payments and technology #
Among the areas that the AI centre of excellence will work on will be agentic e-commerce, said Wong. The bank has already collaborated with Mastercard to pilot end-to-end agentic commerce flows for a company that procures office furniture.
The Singapore pilot connects a procurement ecosystem including a multinational corporate buyer, Singapore-based procurement platform SourceSage, and e-commerce supplier FortyTwo, with HSBC enabling secure payments.
A future scenario, Wong said, which could be explored by the AI centre of excellence would involve the company’s AI agent talking to the bank’s AI agent. “This is how we see AI being embedded into our various platforms and the decision process,” he added.
Such innovative processes reflect the potential for Singapore to be a trusted hub for payments solutions, Wong pointed out.
Already HSBC Singapore has been hard at work in this space. Last year, it established a quantum centre of excellence to explore how emerging quantum technologies could be applied to financial services.
This means focusing on quantum-safe security to safeguard critical infrastructure against future quantum attacks. The centre enables regulators, researchers and fintech firms to trial stands and practical use cases.
HSBC has also been working on tokenised deposits and blockchain technology. This is one way of making the supply chain fast and secure as all the company’s suppliers can be validated on a single platform.
This solution has already been rolled out across six jurisdictions – Singapore, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, the UK, the US and the United Arab Emirates, Wong said.
Regional expansion by corporates and businesses #
In a recent HSBC survey of Singapore companies, practically all of them – some 98 per cent – have the aspiration to venture overseas, Wong said. The bank aims to provide the right structures, platform and connectivity to aid them with their overseas expansion.
Wong said: “We are putting a lot of investment in new technology – technology that drives and meets the customer’s expectations. As an international bank, we need to invest in these areas, to have a transaction banking platform that is global, that can support customers across all areas and geographically as well. So this allows the corporate to have one overall view of all their transactional flows across multi-markets.”
This is especially relevant to Singapore which is a regional hub with HSBC Singapore aiming to support clients across the Asean region.
Apart from serving the large corporates, the HSBC innovation banking platform for Singapore was launched in October last year.
This platform supports startups, and helps them scale and connect them with investors while offering them expertise. With 900 HSBC professionals on this platform, Wong said, the bank primed to offer advice to startups on running a business, such as what is the right mix of equity versus debt.
“Many of these founders have great ideas but they may not have as much experience on managing their daily transactional or working capital requirements,” he said.
“We work with the private equity firms to help their investee companies with solutions to help them manage their working capital. Given our extensive global network, we connect them to new opportunities with other startups, family offices and investors.”
Wealth #
In the wealth space, HSBC sees its services as a continuum, where the bank can continue to help the entrepreneur after an initial public offering, for example.
“We then create and structure products to support the growth of entrepreneurs and even help them undertake legacy planning,” Wong said.
“The first wave of entrepreneurs made money from real estate, then the next made money from manufacturing. Many of the new entrepreneurs are in health tech, clean tech, technology-related. For us at HSBC, we want to provide a holistic solution that takes care of their business, their personal wealth.”
Singapore is the primary wholesale offshore booking centre and wealth hub within Asean. HSBC Singapore continues to invest in capability, distribution and client experience. The bank earlier announced that it will double technology spend over five years, and has opened four new wealth centres since 2024.
Decoding Asia newsletter: your guide to navigating Asia in a new global order. Sign up here to get Decoding Asia newsletter. Delivered to your inbox. Free.
Copyright SPH Media. All rights reserved.
TRENDING NOW MAS tightens policy again in July, defying expectations for a hold
UOB CEO’s youngest child Grant Wee turns burnout into a wellness business
Temasek should publicly state its position on the long-rumoured CapitaLand-Mapletree merger
Dunearn House sells 56% of 380 units at average of S$3,140 psf at launch