HSBC: Human oversight key as AI advances

AI tools should be deployed with strong oversight.

HSBC Holdings Plc’s approach to technology stays the same: it uses innovation only when it solves real problems for clients, even as the artificial intelligence (AI) landscape shifts at breakneck speed.

Senior executives of the bank told Asian Banking & Finance that fast-advancing tech, especially the rise of more autonomous agentic AI, make human and regulatory oversight more vital than ever.

“You can have all the technology, but it needs to solve a problem for the customers,” Winnie Yap, head of Global Payment Solutions at HSBC Singapore, said on the sidelines of the Singapore Fintech Festival 2025.

She said serving customers today means looking beyond HSBC’s direct clients to the people those clients serve.

A company dealing with consumers may need to handle a mix of payment methods—cards, e-wallets, and Singapore’s PayNow, and managing that patchwork could be overwhelming for businesses, Yap said.

The bank’s task is to offer a simplified, unified solution that its clients could in turn offer to their own customers, and tech alone can’t carry that responsibility, she said.

“You can have all the technology there, but the clients still very much value the thought leadership and advice you bring to the table to help them in that journey,” Yap said.

Shayan Hazir, chief digital officer for Asia (excluding Hong Kong) and the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at HSBC, said banking innovation is not a matter of releasing as many tools as possible; strong governance and regulator guardrails are needed to ensure that AI-driven systems remain safe, reliable, and aligned with human values.

“We have to create human guardrails so that we can retain what is our creativity, our compassion, our ability to collaborate and have a conscience,” he said. “Those are things that are not easily going to be translated to AI and to bots and to agentic, and we must design them that way.”

Hazir noted that human judgement has become even more important as AI systems grow more capable.
“AI needs to be ethical, responsible, safeguarded, and governed,” he said. “This is very, very important, because… it is prone to hallucinations. It is prone to reasoning and creating outcomes that make you happy.”

Hazir said the point is not to discourage the use of agentic models or advanced AI tools but to ensure they are deployed with strong oversight.

“We need to make sure there’s a human in the loop right now, and we need to make sure that we’re creating these models with the governance and protections that need to be created,” he added.On the payment side, HSBC sees rising demand for real-time infor

mation and data. Treasurers, in particular, now play a key role in corporate strategy. Tariffs announced by the US and China have affected trade flows, pushing treasurers to make quicker, more informed decisions.

“Treasurers today are no longer the treasurers of the past. They are strategic decision-makers because information is power—data is power,” Yap said.

HSBC’s guiding question remains: “With the technology available, what can banks provide to give them more instant information?” she asked. The solution can be as straightforward as offering an application programming interface (API).

APIs have supported HSBC’s work on tokenised deposits, whilst blockchain underpins the bank’s real-time transfers.

Digital commerce is another major shift affecting the bank’s customers. More than 80% of business-to-consumer payments in Singapore are now made digitally, according to an HSBC study.

Yap said the bank is ready to help clients across all stages of digital maturity. She said some clients are far ahead, working with banks on things like tokenised deposits and other digital innovations. Others are more traditional and are still trying to catch up with recent technology.

Hazir said the goal is to build organisations that can generate ideas easily.

“Rather than silos that we create across departments and across functions, the idea is: How do we gather around problems and opportunities?” he said. “And that is where the technology will deliver outcomes. Otherwise, we’re just learning for the sake of learning.”