HSBC has announced a new multi-year partnership with Mistral AI to accelerate the use of genAI across the bank.

The partnership will give HSBC access to the French AI company’s commercial models, including future developments, with applied AI, science and engineering teams across both businesses working together to develop new genAI tools for the organisation.

HSBC said that future areas of focus for the bank will include customer-facing innovations, such as improvements to credit and lending processes, enhancing customer onboarding, and fraud and anti-money laundering checks.

The move also aims to enhance its existing internal tools, including an AI-powered platform used by the global HSBC workforce to help with productivity tasks.

This will include creating business tasks which support a range of areas across the organisation, such as allowing client-facing teams to deliver tailored communications at a faster pace, enabling marketing teams to launch hyper-personalised campaigns, and helping procurement teams identify risks and savings opportunities.

As well as this, the partnership aims to enhance financial analysis of "complex and document-heavy" client lending or financing processes and provide multilingual reasoning and translation services to help translate and validate information in multiple languages to inform customer interactions.

It will also focus on the faster development of innovation cycles, enabling teams to "prototype, validate and launch new processes or features more rapidly."

“Working with Mistral is an exciting step forward in HSBC’s technology strategy, enabling us to further enhance AI capabilities across the bank," said Georges Elhedery, group chief executive, HSBC. "The partnership will equip our colleagues with tools to help them innovate, simplify daily tasks, and free up time to deliver for our customers.”

The move comes after Dara Sosulski, head of AI and model management at HSBC, said last month that the bank is entering a mature phase of AI implementation and is now heading towards “real ROI”.

Speaking at FTT Festival in London in November, the AI expert said that the bank has several AI use cases already in production, adding that there are many more projects in private testing and proof-of-concept stages.

“We believe we are close to achieving significant and meaningful return on investment from our initiatives,” she told the audience.

Sosulski warned that traditional, slow methods are no longer sustainable in the current era of AI, with organisations urgently seeking to implement and leverage AI technologies “as quickly and effectively as possible”.

In September, HSBC Private Bank launched a genAI-powered platform for its investment counsellors and product specialists to provide clients with market insights and tailored investment strategies.

The Wealth Intelligence platform is powered by OpenAI’s large language model and is designed to analyse and summarise HSBC’s research reports and external news feeds, which currently comprise more than 10,000 data sources.

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