You can make the argument that Google is trying to apply AI to every aspect of our lives. From smartphones and search engines to enterprise services, the company has been steadily expanding the technology’s reach across its ecosystem. Well, the tech giant isn’t really helping its case, as it has just announced a new multi-year partnership with HSBC.
According to the official announcement, HSBC will work with Google Cloud and Google DeepMind engineering teams to develop new AI-powered tools and programmes. Naturally, since this is a Google partnership, these initiatives will have access to the company’s latest agentic AI capabilities, including Gemini models and the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
The programme will initially focus on three key areas, the first of which is what HSBC calls “hyper-personalised wealth management support”. In simple terms, the bank plans to leverage Google’s agentic AI capabilities to provide customers with tailored financial support, insights, and recommendations.
In addition to this, HSBC will also use Google’s generative and agentic AI capabilities to build a new financial crime risk architecture. According to the bank, the system could help it identify risks and take action up to twice as fast, while supporting the monitoring of nearly one billion transactions for signs of financial crime every month.
Lastly, HSBC notes that the new AI features will also support the bank’s staff as much as its customers. Among them is an expanded AI assistant that the bank claims has already reduced administrative work and client meeting preparation time from hours to minutes for thousands of employees.
Furthermore, it will also use AI to translate regulatory procedures into structured guidelines and analysis that bankers can use to support their decision-making. HSBC says this will free up staff from manual work, allowing them to focus on delivering faster insights and more personalised support “while still keeping human judgement at the centre”.
HSBC says the partnership will enable the bank to develop more than 200 new AI use cases over the next two years. Beyond streamlining processes, it will also help the bank identify and prioritise high-value initiatives for investment and deployment, with each potentially generating more than US$100 million in revenue gains or efficiency improvements, or so the company claims. This builds on the more than 600 applications the bank already runs on Google Cloud.
While the press release states that the partnership will span the next two years, neither HSBC nor Google provides a clear timeline for when these “focus areas” will be implemented. That said, The Star reports that HSBC is among the first global banks to lay out how it plans to roll out these AI capabilities.
(Source: HSBC Press release)
