Global bank HSBC has turned to European consulting firm Zühlke for help transforming its mobile wealth management offering to UK customers. Experts from the firm delivered a report into the personal attitudes of British-based customers toward investment, which helped the financial giant to redesign its services accordingly.
With customers impacted by rising inflation, a big focus for HSBC in the last two years has been helping more customers get started with investing. But doing so across each of its geographies requires a different approach, according to the attitudes of consumers there.
HSBC’s global businesses serve around 39 million customers worldwide through a network that covers 62 countries and territories. Amid this, the bank had already built a successful wealth management mobile service for its Asian markets and wanted to leverage this knowledge to build a localised offering in the UK, where 64% of HSBC customers are digitally active. But to do the same in the UK – where it provides retail banking and wealth management products to around 14 million UK customers – research and insights showed that Asia and the UK had very different customer attitudes towards investing.
James Hewitson, HSBC UK’s head of wealth management, recalls, “Around 389,000 of our customers aged under 35 have sufficient assets to invest, but are not doing so today. Empowering these customers to start investing is a clear opportunity to create added value.”
Fresh approach
As such, HSBC determined a different approach would be needed to create a compelling and user-friendly service for the UK market – and identified Zühlke as the perfect partner to help weigh up what that approach should be.
Founded in Switzerland in 1968, Zühlke is a partner-owned consultancy which specialises in strategy and business innovation, digital solutions and applications, and device and systems engineering. With 1,900 employees based in Austria, Bulgaria, Germany, Hong Kong, Portugal, Serbia, Singapore, Switzerland, Vietnam, and the UK, the consultancy was perfectly positioned to help ‘the world’s local bank’ to reorient its offering to one of its many markets.
Zühlke kicked off its collaboration with an extensive user research study, and an eight-week discovery phase to clarify the needs and goals of HSBC and its customers. Working with its own partner Bunnyfoot, the consultancy was able to gain important insight into the customers – including that they were risk averse, and generally lacked confidence in investing (partly due to a lower rate of financial literacy than in Asian markets), as well as a belief that investments only made sense for high-net-worth individuals.
But individuals who were interested in investing said they would prefer to start investing with their existing bank – who they had built up trust with – than new financial services providers, presenting a clear opportunity to HSBC. To help the bank make the most of this, Zühlke developed a number of solutions to adapt the roll-out of its mobile investment services.
Lasting change
This first included a set of three customer profiles to build around: those totally new to investing, those a little more informed and curious, and those with investing experience. Then the experts mapped the existing customer journeys of HSBC to better suit each group – identifying the most impactful improvement opportunities in the process. Through continuous user testing, combined with improved design and delivery processes, the team helped HSBC retool their offering. After further accessibility testing, Zühlke also encouraged HSBC to place educational content at the centre of the project – helping customers to grow their financial literacy, and confidence in investing.
Speaking on the process, Jason Sweeney, HSBC UK’s senior digital product manager, notes, “The Zühlke team helped us bring our wealth management services to the UK mobile banking experience, adding value for our customers. What’s more, they helped us become more agile and customer-centric, allowing us to move smarter and faster.”
According to a release from Zühlke, the collaboration has already resulted in a number of key improvement, foremost of which has seen HSBC UK enjoy year-on-year growth with new investment business volumes increasing by 93%. Part of this is thanks to the mobile journey, which has now become the preferred channel, with over 64% of customers opting to invest with HSBC UK through it.
On top of this, the latest numbers show that 55% of customers now set up a regular investment through HSBC’s mobile enhancements. At the same time, since the launch of the wealth investment dashboard, over 35,000 customers have interacted with it to see how their investments are performing.
The legacy of this development has superseded expectations, and looks set to fuel further developments. In particular, HSBC recently launched an investment dashboard and servicing journeys allow customers to track their investments through the HSBC UK mobile banking app.
