Why we invested in: Silent Eight

We are excited to announce our investment into Silent Eight and welcome Martin, Julia, Michael and their team into the HSBC Ventures portfolio.

Since the inception of our investment team in 2014, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Compliance technologies have always been two key areas of focus for us. When deployed successfully the former allows for greater insights and efficiencies across all areas of Financial Services and being on the forefront of the latter is clearly key to protecting the bank and our customers from Financial Crime.

Silent Eight combines these areas by applying AI models developed over the past few years to the automation of heavily manual compliance related decisions such as customer screening, transaction monitoring and alert adjudication that are typically currently performed by human operators. Given there are now plenty of examples where Robotic Process Automation has been applied to process heavy tasks successfully, this may seem at first to be a simple engineering problem. However, performing consistently to a standard that meets banks’ accuracy requirements while also being able to deliver clear explanations for decisions in a transparent manner is no small feat.

This is the task that Silent Eight have set themselves and we have been following their progress since HSBC first announced its partnership with the company in 2021. Since then Silent Eight has continued to deliver very impressive results and growth with major financial institutions over a short period of time, particularly for such an early stage company. This highlights that their initial core focus on building technology that can truly work at the scale required for major banks is now enabling them to gain traction and returning reward.

From a partnership perspective this investment provides us with a further platform to continue growing our relationship with Silent Eight and support the company as they focus on their next stages of development and solutions. Given the amount of use cases Silent Eight’s technology can be applied to across all sizes of Financial Institutions globally there is a clearly also a significant addressable market, which they have already made a great start positioning themselves in.

Working with the Silent Eight team over the course of the investment has further been a pleasure, and on a personal note I look forward to continue staying close to the company as a Board Observer moving forward.