HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery said on Wednesday that artificial intelligence will destroy and create jobs in the financial industry, and the bank is retraining its workforce to meet the challenge.
Speaking at an HSBC investor day, Elhedery urged staff to embrace AI-driven change rather than resist it.
"We all know generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs," Elhedery said.
"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."
Elhedery said staff must ensure they are "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 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.
StanChart CEO Bill Winters said the bank wanted to replace "lower-value human capital" with technology. He said the affected jobs were mostly non-client facing.
The emerging market-focused lender said it would cut 15% of its corporate function roles by 2030, resulting in more than 7,000 redundancies.
The comments from HSBC and StanChart show top financial institutions are increasingly cost sensitive and scrambling to integrate frontier AI models and fend off rising cyber threats.
HSBC, which in March appointed David Rice as its first chief AI officer, has highlighted AI as key to its strategic goal of increasing returns via automation and streamlining.
The bank is deploying AI across multiple functions, including customer onboarding, financial risk monitoring, contact centers, and wealth management.
