HSBC, Europe's largest lender, is joining The Abu Dhabi Global Market Digital Lab, a platform for financial institutions and FinTech firms to collaborate, test and develop solutions for the financial services sector.
New solutions will be developed in a controlled environment supervised by the ADGM's Financial Services Regulatory Authority, HSBC said in a statement on Tuesday.
“HSBC is developing and deploying some of the industry’s most advanced and innovative technology to make banking easier and more secure,” said Antoine Maurel, head of markets and securities services, CEEMEA (Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa) at HSBC.
“We are keen to explore and test new cost-effective solutions such as API (application programming interface) and middleware-enabled solutions that could connect our systems with FinTechs and other technology providers.”
This month, regulators of banks and financial free zones in the UAE jointly issued guidelines to help financial institutions safely adopt enabling technologies as the coronavirus pandemic hastens digitisation.
The guidelines were issued by the Central Bank of the UAE, the Securities and Commodities Authority, the Dubai Financial Services Authority of the Dubai International Financial Centre, and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Abu Dhabi Global Market.
The guidelines set out best practices for financial institutions when adopting enabling technologies such as application programming interfaces, which allow FinTechs to work with banks’ software; Big Data analytics; artificial intelligence; biometrics; cloud computing and distributed ledger technology.
ADGM aims to grow its digital lab community to 300 entities by late 2022, from 90 at present, according to its chairman Ahmed Al Zaabi.
HSBC reported a 76 per cent surge in its third-quarter profit after the lender released provisions that were earmarked for bad loans that did not materialise.
Pre-tax profit for the quarter to the end of September rose to $5.4 billion, from $3.1bn in the year-earlier period, the bank said in October.
