HSBC AI Markets (Next Gen)

A trader should be able to say what they want, not learn a menu

Institutional traders need to extract more value from their data than most firms can generate alone, so they rely on a bank as their gateway to global markets. HSBC AI Markets, the wider platform, already existed when I joined in 2024, conceived years earlier and launched to institutional clients in 2023 under separate commercial leadership. My scope was narrower and specific: Next Gen, the initiative bringing AI-driven navigation into how traders explore markets. I led it as Innovation Product Lead, Product Lead for Next Gen, with a team of four designers reporting to me.

The reframing was mine: move from command-line and menu-driven navigation to topic-driven, intention-based exploration, letting a trader say what they want to understand or do rather than issuing discrete commands. I also drew the line between machine learning, used broadly across the platform, and generative AI, confined specifically to navigation and kept out of trade decisions. That boundary was a compliance and trust judgement, not only a technical one.

Not a one-off idea, a shift already underway

The deeper move was structural: from people searching for information toward information and signals finding the person, from one generic interface to different AI interaction modes for a trader, a researcher, a relationship manager, each wanting something different from the same data. This is not a hypothesis unique to HSBC. Bloomberg has been rebuilding its own terminal around the same premise, conversational and agentic AI replacing menu-driven navigation. My contribution was recognising and acting on that shift early, inside a regulated institution where the ML and GenAI boundary carries real consequence, not treating it as a hypothetical trend to react to later.

What shipped

The platform is live: a cross-asset data analytics tool and trading terminal in production use by hedge funds, asset managers, regional banks and corporate clients, with a natural-language interface for liquidity monitoring, research access and trade execution. Next Gen's navigation layer is live within it. Red Dot recognised the work with a Design Concept award in 2025, and independent trade press, Markets Media, confirmed the wider platform's institutional and corporate adoption directly from HSBC's Head of AI Markets and Data Sales. My involvement with Next Gen has since concluded; I don't have a navigation-specific adoption number to cite, and I would rather say that plainly than borrow the wider platform's figures as if they were mine.