Khalil Khabibullin.
Strategy · AI · M&A · Transformation

Khalil Khabibullin

I lead strategy, transformation, and M&A in financial services — and help large organisations actually adopt AI, not just talk about it.

Hong Kong · 16 years in financial services, most of it at HSBC
Khalil Khabibullin
What I do

Four disciplines, and the proof

Strategy

Operating models and greenfield builds designed to survive contact with the real organisation.

  • Architected a greenfield insurance entity — regulatory licence and all — aiming to deliver $500M in new-business CSM over five years.
  • Co-authored the GenAI adoption strategy across 8 insurance entities — ideation through to production, with a set of bold bets and brave strategic choices.

AI

From idea intake to prototypes, governance, and rollout across the enterprise.

  • Built an idea-to-prototype funnel across a 7,000-person division — 200+ qualified use cases from one ideation contest.
  • Built and shipped production GenAI and agentic use cases with partners like Google and Microsoft — one-year ROI over .

M&A

Buy-side and sell-side, full lifecycle — due diligence through to post-close warranty.

  • Led transactions totalling $2bn+ in asset value at HSBC Group M&A.
  • Executed a TSA exit and full operational decoupling of a Singapore entity — zero regulatory breaches.

Transformation

Change that reaches Monday morning — people doing different things, not a deck that gets filed.

  • Ran the HSBC Germany legal-entity merger — 3,000+ staff, $78M in verified savings.
  • Designed CRM for 4,000 front-office colleagues, driving $50M in YoY revenue uplift.
A living site

This page updates from how I actually work

No hand-curated theatre. Two streams flow here automatically from my own tools: the notes and posts I publish, and the books I read and review. If it's here, it's because I made it or read it — not because a marketing calendar said so.

Off the clock

The rest of it

Father of three, married to Kate. We live in Hong Kong.

Body & mind

Gym & Hyrox — I do this for longevity, not fun. Did a Hyrox with the boss (aka my wife) and almost died. Might do it again.

Practical Stoicism — Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius as operating principles, not platitudes.

Curiosity

Hard sci-fi — Wolfe, Watts, Banks. Dense, dark, philosophical. Also read in Russian.

The builder side — a self-hosted homelab and a family of AI agents I probably over-engineer, for fun.