HSBC CIO Darryl West partners with Google Cloud on machine learning drive

HSBC CIO Darryl West spoke last week at Google’s Cloud Next event in San Francisco about the global bank’s continued partnership with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to drive the financial institution’s machine learning capabilities.

The bank has now put two pilot projects into production with the vendor, one for country-by-country liquidity reporting and another for anti-money laundering, former Barclays CIO West said.

“Our strategy is to be multi-cloud and we will be doing the majority, if not all, of our data warehouse applications and big data applications with Google,” he said. “We decided they have the best capability there and have been happy with the way we can work collaboratively with them to solve any problems we have.”

The liquidity reporting algorithm would give the bank a view of each country in “minutes not hours” therefore leading to a huge productivity boost. The push for more advanced analytics to cut down on money laundering follows the Mexican scandal for which the bank was fined $1.9 billion in 2012. [Related: The IT roadmap from modernisation to innovation with hybrid cloud]

The bank is also working with Google Cloud to increase the porting of some applications – primarily in its business bank – and data workloads onto the Google’s cloud infrastructure, aiming to have 100 petabytes stored with the vendor by the end of 2018.

The announcements cemented the bank’s intentions to continue with a cloud-first approach.

“In our view, and I have said this to the regulators in the UK and US, if you engage productively with the cloud providers and have the right controls then your customer’s data will be safer and more robust than an on-prem model, and we continue to work with the regulators to convince them of that,” West said.

Click hereto read the whole interview on CIO UK’s sister title, Computerworld UK.