HSBC ‘growing across all our indicators’

Interim Results 2026: HSBC Group CEO Georges Elhedery interview with Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua

Duration: 8:30

Speakers:

[Lizzy]

Well, turning back to European earnings this morning, and HSBC has announced a fresh stock buyback as it reported second quarter results that beat estimates.

The bank said that it would purchase as much as USD1 billion of shares as it reported a USD10.1 billion pre-tax profit for the three months through June.

Bloomberg’s Francine Lacqua now joins us from HSBC’s headquarters in London.

Francine, over to you.

[Francine]

Lizzy, thank you so much.

[Text on screen]
Francine Lacqua, Anchor and Editor-at-Large, Bloomberg Television

I’m delighted to be joined by George Elhedery for an exclusive conversation on the back of those good results.

Mr Elhedery, thank you so much, and welcome to Bloomberg.

[Georges]

Good morning, Francine, and thank you for joining us at HSBC.

[Francine]

Look, USD1 billion in buyback is actually sooner, much sooner than expected.

I mean, what does this say about the strength of HSBC right now?

[Georges]

[Text on screen]
Georges Elhedery, Group CEO, HSBC

Well, I think, I mean, the results as a whole are demonstrating that we are becoming the stronger bank that we set out to build.

We’re very pleased with what we announced this morning.

We’re growing across all our indicators.

Our revenue growing, our loans and deposits are growing, our fee income is growing.

We generated returns of 19.5% on tangible equity.

So this is, you know, this is a good demonstration of strong business momentum.

We’re also very pleased with the progress we’re making on the strategy, which we’re executing with precision, with discipline, and at pace.

And we’ve upgraded some of our strategic deliverables, including simplification-related saves, and just announced three more non-strategic exits over the last 10 days.

That’s 15 exits since 2025.

And all of this is giving us capacity to invest, capacity to accelerate our investment.

And finally, let me say, you know, we’re very confident in the potential of this bank.

We’re very confident in our ability to unlock it.

We are now a leader in a number of areas where we’re operating.

We’re, you know, the Asian leader in wealth management, the world’s trade bank.

And we have structural growth opportunities along our footprint.

I mean, Asian wealth, Asia buys Asia, the UK growth opportunities.

So, we’re pleased to put more of our strength at the service of our clients.

[Francine]

I mean, it’s impressive because when you privatised Hang Seng last year, you said, “Look, in terms of buybacks, we’ll probably take a couple of quarters.”

So, what does this big buyback actually tell us about the return generation capability of the bank post-Hang Seng?

[Georges]

Yeah, so we’re pleased to have resumed buyback this quarter, three quarters after we announced Hang Seng.

We said at that time that our priority would be to rebuild capital post the privatisation.

We estimated three quarters to be about the time to build that.

Three quarters on, we’re able to return excess capital to shareholders.

Remember, our priority use of capital, first is the dividend payout ratio.

Second is supporting the organic growth of the business, organic growth within our risk appetite at the right returns, within our strategic priorities.

And we’re very pleased our loan books have grown.

I mean, UK has seen consistent growth, and we’ve been able to lean in.

We’re very pleased to see Hong Kong finally resume to loan growth.

So, those will be the priority.

Of course, excess capital priority distribution mechanism is share buybacks.

Hence the one billion.

[Francine]

Your head of corporate investment bank said you could actually become a £300 billion, you know, capitalisation bank shortly.

I think by 2030 is what he said.

You’re 30 billion away from that.

Do you think you can become 300 billion in terms of size in the next 6 to 12 months?

[Georges]

Well, look, I mean, we’re certainly very pleased with the share price reaction to the delivery of our strategy.

Where this will go, is a matter for our shareholders to judge.

What I’m really focused on is delivering for the business, focused on all the growth opportunities that we’re driving for the business, delivering the strategy and the simplification at pace.

And, you know, the upgrades we have shown and our capability to do so, and the speed at which we are able to do it safely, are good testament of the capacity we’re creating to invest even further in the business.

[Francine]

Georges, you’ve also said that Hong Kong would overtake Switzerland as the world’s largest cross-border wealth centre by the end of the decade.

Actually, it’s done so already.

What does that mean for wealth creation in Asia and your story in it?

[Georges]

Well, yeah, I’m very pleased to see, you know, Hong Kong again becoming this world leader for cross-border wealth management.

I mean, Hong Kong is a home market for us. We are the leader in wealth management across Asia.

We’ve grown our wealth balances in Hong Kong by 10%.

We’re at half a trillion dollars wealth management.

We continue adding clients in Hong Kong, 640,000 new clients across our two brands, the two iconic brands we hold in Hong Kong, HSBC and Hang Seng Bank.

So, we’re very pleased with the momentum that Hong Kong and the sophistication that Hong Kong as a platform is creating to be, you know, the cross-border leader in the world.

Remember also, Hong Kong is a technology hub.

We’re seeing a lot of investment in Hong Kong in AI.

We will be launching very soon, in the next couple of months, a stablecoin in Hong Kong, you know, as the leading centre for bank-issued stablecoins within a very good regulatory framework.

So, all good developments given our presence in Hong Kong.

[Francine]

I mean, for Hang Seng, how many more synergies are you expecting to come from that?

[Georges]

Yeah, I mean, Hang Seng synergies, you know, we’re executing more than 80% of all the synergy workstreams.

So, this is going on as per plan.

We’ve already announced leadership across most of the infrastructure areas, the back office areas, the technology areas, the manufacturing areas.

This will allow us to, you know, create the alignment and the synergies that we want to achieve.

I’ll give you one example, very telling example.

In Q2, Hang Seng, as of May, started to use some of the digital onboarding capabilities, customer acquisition capabilities that HSBC built.

They were able in Q2 to double the number of clients they onboarded, 60,000 clients onboarded in Q2 compared to 30,000 in Q1.

Immediate visible benefit of those synergies.

[Francine]

Georges, we have a new prime minister here in the UK.

Do you think a possible UK tax on banks is a possibility?

[Georges]

Look, that’s a matter for the government.

What we’re really focused on is supporting the government and the government’s intention to support growth in the UK.

Now, if you want to achieve growth in the UK, you need businesses that are investing.

You need confidence.

For businesses to invest, they need to be able to access financing.

For them to be able to access financing, they need a strong, well-capitalised banking sector to support them.

So, our role, you know, UK is extremely important for HSBC, it’s our home market.

Our role is to support all businesses across the UK.

We support around 700,000 SMEs in the UK, across the UK.

And we’ve grown our lending to them 12%.

We’ve grown our lending to all business in the UK about 10% or USD10 billion.

We already pledged another 5 billion pounds of investment to support SMEs in the UK.

All of that is what is supporting or hopefully supporting that growth that we wish for the UK.

[Francine]

And can you talk to me a little bit about AI?

So, Bill Winters of Standard Chartered last week said that they were using a combination of Chinese and US AI models. What are you using?

[Georges]

Oh, we’re using a broad range of AI models.

We’re partnering with a broad range of AI partners, investing in a broad range of AI models, but we’re doing so thoughtfully and strategically.

We’re deploying AI responsibly and safely.

And we have now multiple hundred use cases, either in production or in pilot stage, and we’re seeing real benefits.

I mean, in coding, we’re seeing in areas productivity up to 300 to 400% higher.

In hyper-personalisation of service to clients, we’re achieving, you know, great, you know, benefits.

Now more than 2,000 of our wealth relationship managers have access to AI tools that help them hyper-personalise advice to clients, and we’ve rolled out productivity tools and productivity capabilities to more than 200,000 of our colleagues, helping them in their day-to-day needs.

© HSBC Group 2026