HSBC has established a fintech R&D lab in collaboration with the Hong Kong Applied Science and Technology Research Institute Company Limited (Astri).
Located at Astri’s facility at Hong Kong Science Park, the lab will explore opportunities for innovation across a broad spectrum of emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence, biometrics, cyber security, big data and blockchain.
Ongoing developments in Chinese character recognition, which is required for back-end processing and other labour intensive process, are high up the agenda. Astri has already developed a system based on four million handwritten Chinese character images which HSBC plans to utilise to automate manual form processing through the application of machine learning technology.
Darryl West, global CIO, HSBC Holdings says: "Today’s partnership is an important way to apply leading academic research into a business environment, and to uplift our technology capability in Hong Kong.”