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Friday, February 07, 2025
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Catherine Zhou | Global Head of Ventures, Digital Innovation and Partnerships at HSBC | Fintech Finance

About Catherine Zhou

https://www.hsbc.co.uk/
Catherine Zhou is the Global Head of Ventures, Digital Innovation & Partnerships at HSBC. She is driving group level efforts to uncover new profit pools, alternative business models and leading changes from outside in. Prior to HSBC, Catherine Zhou ran the Consumer Bank for East West Bank and led the efforts to build an entirely new stack of digital capabilities from ground up. Prior to joining the bank, she was a senior partner at PwC and served as the leader for the Digital Services business for the Financial Services Industry. She is deeply connected to the financial centers in New York, Asia and Europe while rooted in Silicon Valley, San Francisco the Bay area where her root has been, working with start ups and technology giants in developing digital first businesses. She perfects the combination of the left brain of an engineer/ statistician by training (from Carnegie Mellon University) and right brain (marketer for fortune 500 companies and practitioner of the experience economy). She has grown the PwC FS digital teams over 150% YOY over the past 3 yrs since she joined PwC and helped broaden the PwC global brand reach. In 2014, PwC has been recognized as a leader in Digital services. in 2016, PwC was named one of the world’s largest digital agencies and the world’s largest mobile marketing agency by AdAge Magazine. PwC has also named a leader in Digital Transformation, Digital Strategy, Digital Operations, Digital Products/Services, and Customer and Brand Engagement consulting services by leading analyst firms including Gartner and IDC. HSBC hired Catherine Zhou in late 2020 as head of ventures, digital innovation and partnerships following three years heading financial services firm East West Bank’s consumer banking activities. She oversaw efforts to find new profit pools and alternative business models through investments in external startups. Catherine Zhou recently told Global Venturing she sees banking-as-a-service, cybersecurity, fraud prevention and regtech as strong areas within a wider financial technology sector increasingly moving from consumer-facing offerings to business-to-business models. She also stressed the long-term importance of blockchain and tokenisation technology despite recent issues in the cryptocurrency market. During Catherine Zhou’s stint at HSBC, its venture investments included participating in a $200m series C round for blockchain software provider Consensys as well as nine-figure rounds for data analytics software producer Quantexa and automation technology developer Cloudbees.

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