HSBC CEO says AI will destroy and create new jobs, urges staff to embrace change

[HONG KONG] HSBC chief executive Georges Elhedery said on Wednesday (May 20) that artificial intelligence would destroy and create certain jobs in the financial industry, and the bank was retraining its workforce to meet the challenge.

Elhedery told an HSBC investor day event that staff needed to embrace AI-driven change rather than resist it and work with the bank on navigating the new technology.

“We all know generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs,” Elhedery noted. “But my initial mission is I need 200,000 colleagues with us on this journey. However many will be left at the end of the journey isn’t the problem.

“The problem is how can we make sure that those 200,000 colleagues have been given all the capabilities, the training, the tools to make themselves future ready, be more productive versions of themselves.”

Elhedery said that HSBC staff needed to ensure they were “not fighting us, not disenfranchised, not anxious, overwhelmed, and resisting the change”.

The CEO of Europe’s largest bank spoke just a day after rival Standard Chartered (StanChart) announced it would slash thousands of jobs in the coming years, the first among global banks to explicitly reveal AI’s impact on its workforce.

Speaking during an investor day event, StanChart chief Bill Winters said that the bank wanted to replace “lower-value human ​capital” with technology and other investments. He added the jobs affected were mostly non-client facing.

The emerging market-focused lender announced that it would cut 15 per cent of its corporate function roles by 2030, which, according to a Reuters calculation, would result in more than 7,000 redundancies out of the more than 52,000 people working in such roles.

The comments from HSBC and StanChart show the world’s top financial institutions are increasingly cost sensitive and scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyberthreats. Japanese lender Mizuho in March unveiled up to ​5,000 job cuts over a decade.

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HSBC, which in March appointed David Rice as its first chief AI officer, has highlighted AI as the key to the bank’s wider strategic goal ​of increasing its returns, via savings from automating and streamlining its processes. The bank is deploying AI across multiple functions and businesses to simplify operations and personalise content to customers, Elhedery added.

Its customer onboarding and Know Your Customer function, financial risk and monitoring, contact centres, and wealth management, are also undergoing an AI revamp, according to an investor presentation from the bank. REUTERS