HSBC wins Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Award for pioneering AI and data innovation

The company’s advancements have significantly enhanced data accessibility, operational efficiency, and customer service whilst ensuring robust compliance and cost savings.

HSBC has been recognised for its groundbreaking use of data and AI in leading the industry trend in Hong Kong, winning the prestigious Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards, Virtualisation - Banking category. The award highlights HSBC's commitment to embracing technology to improve data-driven decision-making and customer experience.

A key initiative that contributed to HSBC's success is the development of a virtual data lake utilising advanced data virtualisation technology powered by Starburst. This virtual data lake is revolutionising HSBC's ability to access and utilise a wide variety of data across a multitude of data platforms in a highly performant and controlled manner. 

By minimising the need for data movement, the virtual data lake has improved operational efficiency and achieved substantial cost savings. It has also enabled unified data access control across various sources, ensuring compliance with data sovereignty requirements.

The virtual data lake has had a significant impact on HSBC's ability to generate insights and make data-driven decisions.

• Advanced analytics: Brought significant efficiency to HSBC's analytics and operation teams, enabling faster and more effective data-driven decision-making. The virtual data lake has been particularly impactful in the Greater Bay Area in mainland China, where it has accelerated the bank's analytic operations.  
• 20X faster data querying: The accelerated data query feature has drastically reduced the time needed to generate insights from data (from over an hour to under three minutes). This improvement enables the organisation to respond more quickly to business needs, adapt to market changes, and make data-driven decisions faster than ever before.
• Enhanced data accessibility: By integrating data across multiple sources, HSBC has improved data accessibility for employees whilst maintaining data security through masking and access control capabilities.
• Robust data governance and compliance: The approach aligns with the latest data sovereignty requirements and allows the business to rapidly analyse critical data whilst ensuring compliance with data localisation laws across different countries.

“The transformational capability of data virtualisation delivers huge benefit to our business and customers - It empowers our teams with agility, scalability, and the ability to integrate new data sources swiftly and securely, enabling us to better leverage data as a strategic asset to drive better decision-making and customer outcomes for long-term success,” said Kai Yang, Chief Information Officer, Group Data Technology, HSBC. 

Another groundbreaking initiative by HSBC is the implementation of Automatic Call Quality Management (AQM). This innovative solution automates the review of Cantonese-English contact centre sales conversations, ensuring efficient and effective monitoring of call quality. By integrating with the sophisticated transcription solution powered by Fano Labs, a Hong Kong-based AI company specialising in multilingual speech recognition, HSBC was able to automate the transcription and analysis of sales conversations with high accuracy, reducing the labour-intensive nature of the previous monitoring process.

The implementation of AQM has brought significant benefits to HSBC:

• Enhanced operational efficiency by automating the transcription process and achieving a high transcription accuracy rate of over 90%. This is particularly important for sales calls in the local Cantonese language, which is common in the Hong Kong market. 
• Improved risk control by enabling holistic call screening
• Unlocked valuable business insights to drive decision-making and develop tailored services to meet customer needs. 
• This resulted in substantial cost savings by reducing the time and manual resources on quality assurance and speech-to-text transcription. 

"The groundbreaking use of AI technology with our contact centres is bringing together the best of humans and machines in HSBC. The Voice AI strategic capability has the potential to significantly streamline operations, enhance quality controls and ultimately deliver a better experience for our HSBC customers," said Jiahao Teo, Global Head of Data, Analytics & CRM, GPB&W and WPB North Asia, HSBC. 

The recognition from the Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards highlights HSBC's leadership in pioneering the use of AI and data in the banking industry. The success of the virtual data lake and AQM demonstrates HSBC's commitment to innovation, in collaboration with technology partners, to continually elevate quality, security, and efficiency and ensure its data solutions are fit for the future.

The Hong Kong Business Technology Excellence Awards is presented by Hong Kong Business Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2025 awards programme and be acclaimed for your company's outstanding contributions in pursuit of technological innovation, please contact Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected]