HSBC just reported its 2025 full-year results. Profit fell 7.4%, shares hit a record high, and the bank raised its targets for three straight years. That’s the headline most will run. But dig deeper, and there’s a more interesting story playing out, one that’s been quietly building in Hong Kong and is now going global.
HSBC 2025 Earnings: Profit Dip Masks Strong Underlying Growth
HSBC reported a pretax profit of $29.9bn for the full year 2025, down from $32.3bn in 2024. The drop was driven largely by notable items: $2.1bn in dilution and impairment losses tied to BoCom, $1.4bn in legal provisions, and $1bn in restructuring costs. Strip those out, and the underlying story is actually strong.
The bank beat its own analyst estimate of $28.9bn. Shares of HSBC soared to a record following the earnings release, and CEO Georges Elhedery wasted no time raising the bar: HSBC is now targeting a 17% return on tangible equity (RoTE) or better for each of 2026, 2027, and 2028, with revenue growth rising to 5% by 2028. The board also approved a fourth interim dividend of $0.45 per share, a total payout of roughly $7.71bn, the full year totals were substantially more.
This is a bank under new leadership, moving fast. Elhedery called 2025 “a year of decisive action and swift execution.” Eleven business exits were announced. $1.5bn in cost savings are on track to be delivered six months ahead of schedule. The restructuring is real, and it’s working.
But here’s what most commentators will gloss over: the results show HSBC is reorienting itself around two things: Hong Kong and digital assets. And those two things are increasingly inseparable.
Hong Kong Powers HSBC: Revenue Up 6% to $15.9bn
HSBC’s Hong Kong business generated $15.9bn in revenue in 2025, a 6% increase year-on-year. Its deposit base grew 7% to over $540bn. The bank holds a 25% market share in Hong Kong, making it the dominant banking force in the city.
Hong Kong has positioned itself as Asia’s leading digital assets hub, and HSBC is at the centre of it. As we’ve previously reported on how Hong Kong pushed HSBC to embrace digital assets, the relationship between regulatory ambition and bank strategy has become symbiotic, and it’s deepened significantly since 2023.
The HKMA’s Project Ensemble, now in its live pilot phase as EnsembleX, runs throughout 2026. HSBC was the first institution to complete a cross-bank tokenized deposit transaction under the programme, transferring HK$3.8 million for Ant International to another domestic bank in real-time. The pilot involves HSBC alongside Standard Chartered, Bank of China (Hong Kong), BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and HKEX, among others.
The programme runs with real money throughout 2026, focused on tokenized deposits and tokenized money market funds for real-time treasury management, allowing companies to move money 24/7. That’s a structural shift in how corporate cash moves. Hong Kong isn’t theorising anymore. It’s executing.
HSBC Digital Assets Lead: John O’Neill Drives Orion Platform
As Group Head of Digital Assets and Currencies at HSBC, John O’Neill is the person responsible for one of the most ambitious digital asset build-outs inside any major global bank.
He has said publicly that, “At HSBC, we view digital assets, such as digitally native bonds, as a mainstream subject, because our clients see it that way.” He called 2025 the year the industry moves beyond pilots, and 2026 the year liquidity starts to build.
HSBC’s platform, HSBC Orion, has now enabled over $3.5bn in digitally native bonds globally across sovereign, supranational, central bank, financial institutional, and corporate sectors. The client list includes the Hong Kong government, the European Investment Bank, and, as of February 12, 2026, HM Treasury in the UK, which selected HSBC Orion as the platform provider for its Digital Gilt Instrument (DIGIT) pilot.
Supporting O’Neill is Vincent Lau, Global Head of Digital Money at HSBC’s Global Payments Solutions, who led the EnsembleX debut in Hong Kong. And Daragh Maher, Head of Digital Assets Research at HSBC, who has been tracking the macroeconomic impact of the US pivot to crypto, including the strategic Bitcoin reserve and the GENIUS Act on stablecoins.
HSBC Orion: $3.5bn Tokenized Bonds + Gold Token Success
HSBC Orion is the backbone: a digital assets platform that powers bond issuance, tokenized gold, and a growing custody infrastructure for tokenized securities. The platform was behind the Hong Kong government’s $1.3bn-equivalent green bond; the world’s largest digital bond to date. It handled the Luxembourg government’s first digital treasury certificates and enabled the EIB’s first digital sterling bond.
Then there’s HSBC Gold Token, the bank’s tokenized ownership product for physical gold stored in its vaults. HSBC’s Gold Token has recorded over $1bn in traded value since launch and is available to retail investors in Hong Kong and institutional investors in the UK. HSBC was the first bank in the world to offer tokenized ownership of physical gold.
On the compliance side, HSBC has invested in Elliptic, the blockchain analytics firm. HSBC described this as a strategic move to support safe and scalable adoption of crypto and blockchain, giving the bank and its clients a credible AML and risk management layer as digital asset volumes grow.
And then there’s the tokenized deposit expansion, which we covered in detail when HSBC and JPMorgan effectively took on stablecoins directly. Tokenized deposits are live in Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, and Luxembourg. HSBC is expanding to the US and UAE in the first half of 2026. The bank processes transactions in euros, pounds, US dollars, Hong Kong dollars, and Singapore dollars, with UAE dirhams to follow.
HSBC Crypto Commitment: Real Revenue from Tokenized Assets
Big banks have a long history of making blockchain announcements, only to retreat quietly. The difference here is that HSBC is booking real revenue and real transactions in Hong Kong, not issuing press releases about pilots that go nowhere.
The $15.9bn Hong Kong revenue figure, the EnsembleX first mover position, the UK DIGIT mandate, and the HSBC Orion track record all point to a genuine infrastructure build rather than optics. O’Neill’s framing that liquidity begets liquidity is exactly right. Once institutional clients commit to a digital assets rail, switching costs rise, and the network deepens.
Still, there are real constraints. Regulatory frameworks for digital assets remain fragmented across borders, and legal certainty for cross-border settlement is still taking shape. HSBC’s approach, embedding digital products within existing regulated banking infrastructure rather than building separate crypto-native entities, is defensible from a compliance standpoint. But it also means the bank is dependent on regulators moving in sync. O’Neill himself acknowledged this, noting that “regulators are moving in the same direction,” and that coordination is what makes cross-border digital platforms viable.
The HKMA is a strong partner. The UK Treasury just committed. The US and UAE are next. If that regulatory alignment holds through 2026 and into 2027, HSBC’s early positioning starts to look less like a strategy and more like a moat.
HSBC Outlook 2026: Scaling Digital Assets + $45bn NII Target
HSBC expects banking NII of at least $45bn in 2026, with ECL charges at around 40bps of average gross loans. The CET1 ratio will dip below the 14%-14.5% target range in early 2026, largely due to the privatisation of Hang Seng Bank, before recovering through organic capital generation.
Digital Merchant Services, the bank’s omnichannel payments product, is currently live in Hong Kong, India, and Singapore, with six more markets set to launch in 2026. More than 100 GenAI use cases are active across the bank.
But the trajectory of digital assets is the one to watch. HSBC has spent two years building the infrastructure quietly while others debated whether banks should touch crypto at all. The 2025 results confirm it is performing financially. The real test in 2026 is whether it can scale these digital asset platforms into sustainable, material revenue lines and whether Hong Kong’s regulatory leadership serves as a model for the rest of the world.
If it does, HSBC won’t just be Europe’s largest bank by assets under management. It will be the world’s most digitally embedded financial institution with a credible claim to leading the next phase of institutional finance.
Author: Ayanfe Fakunle
The editorial team at #DisruptionBanking has taken all precautions to ensure that no persons or organizations have been adversely affected or offered any sort of financial advice in this article. This article is most definitely not financial advice.
See Also:
Standard Chartered Boosts Digital Adoption with Record Results | Disruption Banking
HSBC & JPMorgan Just Killed Boring Stablecoins with Yield-Bearing Deposits | Disruption Banking
