Good afternoon everyone. I have the honor
and privilege of leading a fantastic IT
team at HSBC. A team that is at center of
the transformation of HSBC into a
simpler, better, faster, and more secure
company for its customers. We have an
aspiration to be the most awesome IT
team on the planet in financial services,
and we see our purpose as transforming
the world's banking experience. I'm going
to talk to you now about how we're
partnering with Google to be able to
realize that ambition. The Hong Kong
Shanghai Banking Corporation is a
hundred and thirty-five yearsóhundred
fifty-three years oldósorry.
Weíre the worldís leading international
bank. We're present in 67 countries. We
have 38 million customers, customers
ranging from individuals to small
businesses, to corporations, to
governments, and we are the number one
trade finance business in the world. We
are the number one financier of
cross-border trade. We're a significant
player in the financial foreign exchange
markets, so we are a central part of
global commerce. We have 200ó2.5 trillionó
sorry, assets on our balance sheet, but more
importantly, we have a huge data asset at
the core of the company. And this yearóby
the end of 2018ówe'll pass 100 petabytes
of data. And within that data, there's a
massive amount of insight, and we need to
leverage the tools that we're using now
with Google to get that insight to be
able to manage our business better. So
last year, when I was here, we talked about our
vision of where we wanted to get to, to
be a cloud-first company. Now HSBC is no
different to most other big global
enterprises. We tried for many years to
build data centers, provision our
infrastructure, buy products, and run it
all ourselves, and weíve decided, about 18
months ago, that we ought to really decide
to focus on what we're great at, which is
customer experience and focusing on our
customers, and partnering with people
like Google to actually do all the heavy
lifting on infrastructure. So we've moved
through this journey with Google
over the last year or so now, to get to the
point where we're going to have this
managed service with elastic
capacity
allowing our teams in the bank to focus
on the data science, the data management,
the data processing that enables much
better customer experiences. And of
course, as we've been going through this
journey, weíre collaborating
with the Google team on the platform.
Now we are a globally, systemically,
important financial institution, and as
you can imagine, in the banking business,
itís a heavily regulated business. It's an
important tenant of the banking business
that you have trust and confidence, the
data is secure, the services are reliable,
and performing, so clearly anything we
do that departs from history is going to
be a ... issue with the
regulators. So the first issue we've had
to deal with here is this list of
questions. Now, the regulatorsówe've
spent the last year or so working very
closely with them, and given our
geographic spread, we have pretty much
every regulator in the world is looking
at what we're doing, so we've had to
invest a significant amount of our time and
efforts to convince the regulators that
moving customer data to the cloud is
actually a good thing, and I've taken the
position with the industry and with the
regulators that the more we do with
Google in the cloud makes the industry a
more safe and more reliable and more
robust industry. So we've worked with the
regulators. We got them to the point now
where they're comfortable. They've asked
us to assess all the risks end-to-end. We
have to take the whole proposition to
our managing board and a group risk
committee and weíve got them comfortable. They
asked us to make sure we covered all the
issues around operational controlóthings
like who controls the access to the
platform. Where will the data be? Weíre
governed by 67 countriesí different rules
around data privacy and data sharing, so
we have to be in compliance with those
rules. We need to know what's happened,
how we can monitor the logging on the
virtual private cloud, and critically, we
have to understand how the encryption
keys are working because the fact that
the data is encrypted at rest in the
Google cloud is fantastic, but the
regulators are requiring the banks to be
able to control and manage those
encryption keys. And the last thing, and
actually probably just as important as
all the others, is how we'll work
together. We're a company thatís a 153
years old.
We have a certain culture and a way of
doing things. And partnering with a West
Coast tech company on implementing
these types of new things required a
complete change in mindset and approach
and one that required an agile and a
DevOps method to get there. So we've done
all of these and answered all of these
questions, and we're in a very good space
moving forward. We've collaborated very
very closely with the engineering team.
We formed a joint team just over a year
ago to work through the challenges. We've
created a cloud framework for banking
which I think will become the standard
model for financial services around the
world, describing the controls you have
to have, from extracting your data from
your core systems, putting it out into
the cloud, making sure that it's
encrypted well, making sure that the
access is controlled and you have the
right loggingóall of those controls have
been really studied carefully. And
through the course of our collaboration
with Google, we've seen a modification to
the product, an improvement to the
Google offerings, and in the, in the space
of customization of roles, regional
support, I mentioned the logging for
virtual private cloud and critically, the
customer-managed and customer-supplied
encryption keys. So this has all been
done, and it's now ready for prime time,
and we're going on a sort of a global
tour to convince all the regulators that
I deal with this is going to be a better
way of running the banking business. So
the results so far have been actually
quite stunning. A year ago I stood up
here and talked about the various use
cases in the banking world around
financial liquidity
calculations, stress testing, risk-
weighted asset calculations that the
finance teams have to do. I talked about
the risk function in terms of market
risks and how they have to run
multicolor simulations to calculate
market risks. I talked about financial
crime and the ability to ingest billions
of transactions and look for nefarious
activity patterns in those transactions,
and when using the tools now in this, in
this platform to be able to identify
money-laundering activity within a
global network. So as we speak, as weíre
standing here today, we now have these two
very specific and very important use
cases live. We're now able to calculate a
global liquidity for a country in
minutes rather than hours,
and critically, using BigQuery, weíre able
to run a financial crime analytics ten
times faster with a much higher level of
precision and accuracy, so this has been
a fantastic outcome for us, and its
really given us a great confidence to
actually progress. We have a long list
and batting order of new workloads to
come over the coming months. So in terms
of what's next for our relationship with
Google, we really enjoy our
interaction with the thought leaders here
at Google. The first thing we're
obviously going to do is double-down on
our data agenda, so we're going to
complete over the next 18 months or so
the wholesale migration of our big
data workloadsóanalytics, machine
learning workloadsóto the Google
platform, and only this week we've
publicly announced our seven-year
commercial strategic alliance with
Google as a partner in this space. On
data management, interestingly, we have
a similar problem to most big companies.
Historically we've not had a great data
architecture, and weíre working with
the Google team to evaluate ways of being
able to catalog all of our data and our
huge hundred petabytes of data. It's been
difficult for us to be able to organize
and understand what we have and where it
is, so we're working with the
engineering team that have come up with
some tools, and you may hear about those
tools at this event next year. And
more importantly, I guess of all of it is
what you heard this morning about CSP at
Istio from Urs. It was great to
see we had HSBC's name up there when he
talked about the announcement of this. Weíve
worked very closely with Ursí team on
developing the whole suite of Kubernetes
On-Prem. That's very important for us
that we have a containerization and
orchestration engine like Kubernetes
available to us to run on our own for
our on-prem workloads as we do that
migration from on-prem to the cloud over
the longer time. So we're very proud of
our partnership we've had there with the
Google team on applications hosting, and
we've defined a new stack for us for a
next-gen set of applications that will
leverage that suite of
tools that Urs was talking about this
morning. And in terms of new propositions,
we're now developing
mission-critical applications for our
business. For example, our business
banking franchise, which is a huge
franchise globally
for us across our 67 countries, weíre
developing a whole new set of trust in
the channels up in the Google stackóin
the native stackótop to bottom, which just
shows our confidence in the tools that
are on offer from this great team
here at Google. So in closing, I just want
to say that we have a new chief
executive. John Flint was appointed to
our chief executive position back in
February. We've refreshed our global
strategy, and we now talk about
commercial growth being our primary
driver, and it's very clear to me and to
the executive team that partnering with
Google and enabling our cloud journey is
going to be a key enabler of that, of
that commercial growth over the coming
three years or so. So I just want to say
it's been a fantastic collaboration. We
hope that continues, and as our
HSBC strapline says, together
we will thrive. Thank you very much.