Senior HSBC executives hid behind co-head roles: CEO

LONDON - HSBC Holdings chief executive Georges Elhedery said not enough executives were fully accountable for the performance of their businesses before he began his radical restructuring of the bank 15 months ago.

Since taking charge of Europe’s largest lender, Mr Elhedery has nearly halved the size of its operating committee, getting rid of the co-management roles he thought allowed bosses to avoid responsibility for their decisions.

“We moved from 0 per cent single accountability,” Mr Elhedery said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Leaders with Lacqua. “Everything had dual or multiple accountability, to now about 60 per cent of our revenue is generated under single accountability. That’s important.”

His previous roles included co-head of global banking and markets.

Mr Elhedery said there was still more to be done to make HSBC a simpler and leaner bank as he continues a turnaround that has already involved thousands of job losses, the shuttering of several businesses and the merger of others.

AI influence

One of Mr Elhedery’s focuses as he slims down the business is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into HSBC’s operations. He said rolling out AI to the company’s more than 200,000 workers was already well under way.

“Utilisation is not optional because that’s how people remain very relevant in the future workforce five years down the road,” said Mr Elhedery. “I will be monitoring usage, I’ll be monitoring super-usage. Those will be the most influencing among their colleagues to drive the utilisation.”

HSBC has already provided AI tools to about 170,000 of its employees, embedding the technology in businesses such as its wealth management arm, as well as using it to write and review documents. Other initiatives include using AI for fraud detection and know-your-customer checks. 

“We have more than a hundred cases, of which half of them are live in production,” said Mr Elhedery. “While we as humans will not be replaced by AI, if we don’t know how to embrace it and upskill ourselves using it, we will become obsolete.”

Chinese Lessons

Mr Elhedery also talked about his wider leadership philosophy, including his decision to learn Mandarin, which made him the first CEO of the London-headquartered, but largely Asia-focused, bank to speak Chinese in its 160-year history.

The CEO said that the move stemmed from his six-month sabbatical from the bank three years ago. “I knew if I really wanted to make a leapfrog in my early starts in Mandarin, it needed much more time.” 

“If you really want to understand the Chinese way of thinking, the way of reasoning, the way of negotiating or engaging or presenting simply, there is no better way than the pain in trying to learn the language,” he added.

A polyglot who already speaks French, Arabic, German, Japanese, among other languages, Mr Elhedery hopes other staff might follow his example and take time out from the bank for their own professional development.

Ruthless restructuring

Earlier in December, speaking at a banking conference in London, Mr Elhedery stressed the need for a “ruthless” approach to rebuilding HSBC. In his Bloomberg interview, he said that he had drawn on his training as an engineer when looking at what needed to be done to equip the bank for the future.

“I was definitely ruthless about killing the complexity and the drag on the bank,” he said. 

“I think back to my engineering days: entropy is a feature,” Mr Elhedery said. “Things don’t become complex by design, they end up becoming complex by lack of focus. So bringing the focus at the simplification will allow you to start dealing with it.” BLOOMBERG