Hawk AI Appoints HSBC Veteran Michael Shearer Chief Solution Officer

Hawk AI appointed HSBC veteran Michael Shearer as chief solution officer.

Shearer spent much of his career at HSBC, including serving as the bank’s group head of compliance product management, Hawk AI said in a Tuesday (Jan. 16) press release. In that role, he helped equip HSBC with advanced systems, tools and data to manage financial crime risk.

Before HSBC, Shearer worked in government intelligence and counter-terrorism for 20 years, according to the release. He is also the author of an upcoming book, “Hands-on Entity Resolution: A Practical Guide to Data Matching With Python.”

“We’re delighted that Michael is joining the team at Hawk AI,” Hawk AI CEO Tobias Schweiger said in the release. “His combined knowledge of intelligence and banking is second to none, and we’re honored to have him onboard.”

Hawk AI provides banks and payment providers with artificial intelligence-powered technology for fraud and anti-money laundering surveillance, according to the release. The technology can enhance or replace traditional rules-based systems, enabling financial institutions to reduce false positive rates.

Shearer joins the company at a time when Hawk AI, which was founded in 2018, has scaled globally and now processes billions of transactions across 60 countries, the release said.

“I’ve always been driven by the desire to make the world a safer place, and that task is as urgent and important today as it has ever been,” Shearer said in the release. “I’m looking forward to working with my colleagues at Hawk to reshape the global fight against financial crime to prevent and combat the funding of terrorism, human trafficking and other serious crime.”

PYMNTS Intelligence found that FIs are enhancing their fraud-fighting efforts to combat the growing threat of fraud.

For example, the share of FIs with assets of $5 billion or more that are using machine learning and AI technologies to combat fraud has grown from 34% in 2022 to 66% today, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence study “The State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the U.S. 2023.”