AI in Banking: HSBC's Plan and Australia's Parliamentary Response

On Friday (9) in Canberra, Senator Tony Sheldon asked ANZ's data and AI director, Kai Yang, how many jobs artificial intelligence had created at the bank inside and outside Australia. Yang responded that AI has not caused job losses and that he sees more opportunities being created. When the senator insisted on numbers, he said he would respond later. Two days earlier, the Financial Times revealed that HSBC plans to cut approximately half of the management and specialist positions in wealth management in the UK and up to 70% of financial advisers.

These two scenes are often interpreted as evidence of opposing sides in the same debate. When read together, they show that the question "Is AI cutting jobs in banks?" is misdirected.

What Each Bank Said and Didn't Say

The hearing brought together ANZ, Westpac, and NAB in a joint parliamentary committee on AI. Sheldon asked if Westpac's recent offshoring of jobs was related to the use of AI. The bank's AI director, Dan Jermyn, replied that the company has thousands of employees and does not believe AI is linked to offshoring. Peter Steel from NAB argued that Australia should not forfeit hosting data centers and training the workforce domestically.

HSBC, for its part, did not confirm the percentages published by the FT. In a statement to Reuters, it merely stated that it continues to evolve its wealth business in the UK with more digital products and journeys to meet customer needs. The term artificial intelligence does not appear in the statement. The connection to AI was made by the sources cited by the newspaper.

The Contrarian Position Deserves Serious Consideration

Yang and Jermyn may be correct about their banks, and the automatic skepticism towards them is as lazy as the enthusiasm of those who see AI-related layoffs in every cut. The HSBC case itself weakens the thesis of purely technological cuts. The official statement mentions digital channels, and moving retail clients to apps is a decision banks have been making since before the advent of large language models. The figures of 50% and 70% come from individuals familiar with the plan, not from the institution, and employee consultations are still ongoing, according to the coverage.

On the opposite side, the lack of data does not absolve anyone. Yang's response to the jobs question was marked as "on notice," parliamentary jargon for delayed response. A bank that measures productivity for each AI use case and cannot state how many jobs it has created or eliminated is choosing not to disclose the numbers.

The Axis That Matters: Layer and Geography

The most revealing statement of the week came from Singapore. On Thursday (8), at the Milken Institute Asia Summit, Kevin Sneader, who leads Goldman Sachs in Asia-Pacific, said, according to Bloomberg, that young hires are already beginning by managing AI agents. Replacing middle managers, he added, will be "the generational challenge" for many sectors. There was no announcement of cuts at Goldman. Rather, there was a description of a pyramid without the middle layer.

It is in this layer that the plan attributed to HSBC focuses its cuts: managers, specialists, and advisers servicing middle-wealth clients. It is neither the new hire, who according to Sneader already enters managing agents, nor the customer with complex needs, for whom HSBC's new model is expected to reserve human service, according to analyses of the plan.

Geography completes the picture. In Australia, Parliament is discussing whether AI and offshoring are part of the same movement, and banks are responding that they are not. Australian and British banks have maintained operational centers in India and the Philippines for years, and it is there that processing, verification, and standardized customer service work has been handled in the last decade. If AI initially absorbs repetitive tasks, these centers are more exposed than branches in Sydney or London, and Sheldon’s question about jobs "inside and outside" the country gains a third possible answer: the offshore role may be the next to disappear, without returning home.

The Evident AI ranking, released on October 6, helps measure competitive pressure. JPMorgan leads for the fifth consecutive year, UBS rose to sixth place as the only European bank among the top ten, and HSBC dropped from eighth to eleventh. A bank that loses position in AI maturity in the same week it restructures its advisory force in the domestic market sends a signal to investors and regulators that the official statement does not clarify. For Westpac and ANZ, the reckoning will come when the "on notice" responses arrive at the committee with numbers, or when they fail to arrive.