SINGAPORE: HSBC Holdings Plc chief executive officer (CEO) Georges Elhedery sees a fragmented world with more “national security assets” from data to semiconductors, but said that cross-border trade still presents the lender with massive opportunities.
Despite all the looming challenges, there will still be a “cohesive financial system,” said the CEO, who leads the world’s biggest trade bank, at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore yesterday.
“There are certain assets, which have now become or be deemed national security assets such as code, gen-AI (generative artificial intelligence) type code, such as chips, semiconductors, the most advanced types of them, such as data and cloud,” Elhedery said. “And those assets are going to fragment. Those assets are going to have national boundaries.”
Outside of that, he said “there’s a huge ocean of opportunities where business is still conducted on a cross border basis.”
The London-headquartered firm is the world’s largest trade bank and an anchor of commerce between the Asia-Pacific region and the rest of the world. — Bloomberg
