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HSBC and Mistral AI have announced a strategic partnership to enhance and accelerate the use of generative AI across the bank, improving business processes, saving employees time and helping to better serve millions of customers globally.

This multi-year partnership provides access to Mistral AI’s commercial models, including future developments.

Under the agreement, HSBC and Mistral’s applied AI, science and engineering teams will collaborate on the development of generative AI solutions across the organisation.

HSBC will combine its strong internal technology capabilities with Mistral AI’s deep expertise in foundational model development. This will enable HSBC to enhance current AI initiatives through self-hosted AI models that operate on HSBC’s internal technology systems.

HSBC is continually assessing a wide range of large language models (LLMs) as part of its technology strategy. The bank saw a valuable opportunity to use Mistral’s AI expertise to enhance its internal tools, including an AI-powered platform used by HSBC colleagues globally to help with productivity tasks. This includes:

• creating business tasks which support a variety of needs across the bank, such as allowing client-facing teams to deliver tailored communications at speed, enabling marketing teams to launch hyper-personalised campaigns, and helping procurement teams identify risks and savings opportunities
• enhancing financial analysis of complex and document-heavy client lending or financing processes
• multilingual reasoning and translation services: helping to translate and validate information in multiple languages to inform customer interactions
• faster development innovation cycles: enabling teams to prototype, validate and launch new processes or features more rapidly

The partnership with Mistral builds on HSBC’s investments in the latest AI technologies which are focused on increasing business efficiencies and better serving customers.

Future areas of focus for HSBC will include customer-facing innovations, such as improvements to credit and lending processes, enhancing customer onboarding, and fraud and anti-money laundering checks.

Georges Elhedery, Group CEO, HSBC, said:

“Working with Mistral is an exciting step forward in HSBC’s technology strategy, enabling us to further enhance AI capabilities across the bank. The partnership will equip our colleagues with tools to help them innovate, simplify daily tasks, and free up time to deliver for our customers.”

Both organisations are committed to the responsible use of AI and will work together to ensure all deployments adhere to the highest standards of AI transparency, data privacy, and technology development.

Arthur Mensch, Mistral AI Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, said:

“We are proud to engage in this long-term partnership with HSBC. Our highly customisable, enterprise-grade frontier AI solutions will reinvent HSBC’s workflows and services while ensuring full ownership of data. Together, we will provide HSBC’s employees with high-end, AI-powered productivity tools and a new generation of banking services for millions of customers worldwide.”

The medicines regulator has added two new safety warnings around mental health and contraception for people taking high profile diabetes and weight loss drugs.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) says because suicidal behaviour and ideation have been reported with these relatively new GLP-1 receptor agonists, doctors should “monitor patients for the emergence or worsening of depression, suicidal thoughts or behaviours, and/or any unusual changes in mood or behaviour”.

This warning around the potential risk of suicidal thoughts applies across the GLP-1 RA class of medicines including Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda, Trulicity and Mounjaro.

The TGA has also issued a separate warning around Mounjaro and contraception.

After investigating the potential reduced effectiveness of oral contraception when first taking or increasing the dose of Mounjaro, the TGA said it could not rule out an association.

As a precautionary measure, they have updated the product warnings for Mounjaro to include further advice for patients using oral contraceptives to switch to a non-oral contraceptive or add a barrier method of contraception for four weeks after first taking the medicine and for four weeks after each increase in the dose.

They add that none of the GLP-1 RA class of medicine should be used during pregnancy.