DARRYL WEST: So yes, I'm Darryl West.
I have the honor and the privilege
of leading an awesome IT team at HSBC, the Hong Kong Shanghai
Banking Corporation.
We are driving a transformation of the whole company
through our IT team, and I'm going
to talk about what we're doing and the partnership that we've
had with Google and that journey over the last couple of years.
So many of you may not know who HSBC is,
but we are the largest international bank
in the world.
We have 39 million customers.
Our customers are typically people
like yourselves, individuals.
We have small businesses, we have companies,
and we have governments as our customers.
We're present in 66 countries around the world.
And we have a broad range of services,
right from personal services, right
through to global markets and investment banking.
So we have a massive amount of infrastructure
supporting our organization.
We're moving $1.5 trillion a day through our systems.
And as you can imagine of a bank of this scale,
we have a large infrastructure.
Now we are like every other big global bank.
We've been in the business now for 153 years.
And we've built up a very large, on-premise infrastructure.
So at the last count, we had 169 petabytes of data.
We have data centers in many centers
around the world, two primary ones in Hong Kong and the UK,
but a small spread of others around the world
because we have to keep some data in countries
due to regulation.
And we have over 90,000 servers.
And the IT team of 40,000 people, this year,
has a budget of just over $3.5 billion on change.
So one of the big issues for us is the productivity
of our developers, the fact when you're spending that much money
on change programs for the bank, you
want to make sure you have a massive amount of productivity.
Now, we've been partnering with Google now
for the last three years.
And we are, because of our nature,
we are a globally systemically important
financial institution, a GSifi, as they're called.
And we have every regulator in the world all over what
we're doing.
So we have to be very careful that we
are doing the right things according to our regulators.
So these are the questions that we sat down with Google two
or three years ago when we started this journey.
How are we going to work together?
What will our regulators think about what we're doing?
How do we govern the cloud activity we're doing?
How do we control access to the data?
Do we know where the data actually is?
And do we understand the risks we're
running at the end-to-end process of being on the cloud?
So now, we've spent a lot of time, and with some delays,
I guess, and getting the regulators in the last couple
of years comfortable with the fact
that the cloud is a good place to be
for an enterprise like HSBC and the big banks.
They've all been with us in going this direction.
Some of the requirements we have around data security
and resilience are really important.
It's a trust and confidence is a core part of the banking
business.
So we had to make sure that anything we did with Google
was going to be really strong and reliable
and the information security was going
to be the best in the world.
So we worked with the Google team
on these service enhancements.
So when we looked at the product for the first time
a couple of years ago.
We thought that the customer managed encryption keys needed
some work.
We did some work with the team on the virtual private cloud
service controls so we could ring fence the data
and put better data leakage protection controls.
We wanted to have logging and notifications back to us
so we could know that anybody changed anything in the service
footprint with Google.
With our services that we're running,
we could get notified about that.
And because of our requirement to keep data in some countries,
specifically due to regulation, we
have to have what we call geo-fencing, which
is we could actually define where the data would be stored
within the Google environment.
So these were enhancements that we worked on
with the Google team.
We now feel with these enhancements to the services
we have that we're now ready for prime time
for a regulated global bank.
So that's been a great partnership,
and I think the regulators have really appreciated
what we've done here together.
Now, in terms of business value--
well, this is a real case study of what's actually live.
So this talks about global liquidity.
So if those of you-- and many of you here,
I'm sure you're not bankers.
Liquidity is when you check on your mobile device what
your balance is on your account, you're doing a liquidity check.
You're seeing how much money you have.
This process is to figure out what our liquidity,
or what our balance is in the bank on a global scale.
So we have 47 regions or countries where
we have to calculate this.
And under the old way of doing it on the on-prem environment,
to do our daily reporting calculations,
would take us anything from 9 to 14 hours to do that.
We're able to do that in a couple of hours
now with Google.
And on a monthly basis, we have to do an analysis and some look
back of how we're doing our funding and the trends.
That was taking us 40 hours to do that,
now taking about three hours.
So this is now live in 28 countries.
It will be fully live by June of this year,
and it's delivering tremendous value.
And our regulators to the bank of England in the UK
are delighted in the fact that we can now
provide this information in a more timely manner.
So this has been a fantastic thing,
and it's because we've been plugging
into the massive capability that computer capabilities
available through GCP.
Now in terms of customer outcomes,
we're actually partnering with Google
on a top secret projects, so you didn't hear it from me.
And I know none of this is going out in the public domain.
So this is a secret project.
We're actually building a new platform for business banking.
So the SME market, which is the small and medium enterprise
market, is a massive business for HSBC globally.
It's a significant part of our customer base.
And we have decided to partner with Google
to develop a whole new suite of platforms for that market.
We're going cloud first from the beginning.
It's going to be mobile first from the beginning,
a whole new security platform.
We're using a full DevOps lifecycle,
CICD pipeline using GKE.
And it's going to be utilizing all the data analytics, AIML
and the MLP tools that we have from Google.
So we're very excited about this.
It's progressing really well.
It's a moonshot.
I know Google uses the term moonshot.
It's a moonshot for HSBC, this particular project,
and I think it'll be game changing.
It's going really well.
The beta testing is really, really, doing really well.
So that's a customer outcome that we're working on together.
We told you if we talk this morning about the Cloud
Services Platform, the [INAUDIBLE]
newly branded product.
Our engineers have been installed here
in Mountain View working with the Google team
to developed this way with a primary partner, the enterprise
partner they had to develop this.
It's very important because of their constraints
in our business where we have to keep some data on-prem
and the regulators will also require
us to keep some workloads on-premise.
We wanted the ability to have an image on-prem and an image
in the cloud that was the same so that the developers could
actually have a seamless experience whether they're
on or off.
And obviously, having a common control plane
to manage both of those is hugely
beneficial from a productivity perspective.
So this is now live.
And it was announced this morning
for general availability, and we're deploying
this within HSBC at scale.
So the overall results of this has
been a really fantastic outcome for us.
We approach this with a lot of enthusiasm
and our expectations have been exceeded tremendously.
We now are developing new digital banking propositions.
I talked about the SME proposition
using analytics ML and NLP.
I talked about the liquidity reporting benefits,
business benefits we've had.
We also are a major global player in the foreign exchange
markets and are now able to do our AI modeling in the FX
business.
it Used to take us 120 minutes.
Now it takes 10 minutes.
And we can rerun those analytics several times
throughout the day.
We are migrating workloads from heritage data
warehouses not to be named.
But they're coming from those data warehouses on-prem
into GCP.
And we've got now business reporting
and financial reporting coming out more frequently and more
accurately.
And that's providing tremendous benefit of value
to the finance function and the risk function, particularly.
The other thing we do is we are partnering with our friends
here at Google to develop a suite of solutions
for financial crime detection.
So one of the things we do as a global bank is we
have an obligation to work with the authorities
around financial crime prevention and anti money
laundering.
So with the ability to ingest very large time series of data
and apply analytics to that, we're
able to identify anomalous activity accurately,
which has improved the outcomes of our detection
of financial crime.
So we're actually working to create
a much simpler, better faster set of risk management tools
in that demand.
That'll be coming to market in--
realized next year in 2020.
And overall, our overall agility and getting
to market through proof of concepts has been great.
So we've been delighted with the outcome that we've had.
We have a strap line, it's HSBC.
But together we thrive, and this has been a great partnership
with Google.
And we're thriving together every day.