HSBC Global Viewpoint The Macro Brief – Where next for AI?
Dec 5, 2025
Mark McDonald, Head of AI and Data Science at HSBC, and Yuning Bai, Data Scientist, delve into the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in finance. They discuss the rapid adoption of AI in the US compared to Europe and explore whether AI can generate profitable FX trade ideas. The duo highlights the struggle of models to replace human intuition and warns about biases in AI recommendations. They also define agentic AI, emphasizing its potential along with the need for human oversight to mitigate risks. Is the AI boom a bubble? They dissect this debate too!
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AI Adoption Is Coming Of Age
- AI implementation is maturing and companies—especially in the US—are actively embedding AI into operations.
- Markets reward US firms for AI adoption even when traditional metrics don't yet show measurable impact.
FX Morning Bullets Test
- The team fed HSBC's FX Morning Bullets into reasoning models to ask for directional FX trade recommendations.
- Human FX strategists then judged model outputs pairwise to evaluate reasoning quality.
Human Preferences Reveal Model Hierarchy
- Pairwise human preference ranking (direct preference optimization) revealed GPT-5 and Claude topped reasoning quality.
- Smaller, cheaper models performed worse on this subjective reasoning evaluation.