HSBC mobile app empowers UK customers to start investing

What we did

HSBC partnered with Zühlke to solve this challenge with the help of our world-class experience design capability.

We kicked off our collaboration with extensive user research and an eight-week discovery phase involving stakeholder workshops to clarify the needs and goals of the business and its customers.

The qualitative research, delivered with our partner Bunnyfoot, allowed us to gain a deep understanding of HSBC’s customers and their relationship with investing.

Research findings revealed that:

• UK customers lack confidence in investing and are risk averse.
• Awareness and financial literacy is much lower in the UK than in HSBC’s Asian markets.
• Many UK customers believe that investing is for high-net-worth individuals only, and requires huge upfront investment.
• UK customers trust their existing bank and would rather start investing with them than go to a different financial services provider.

Our research showed that HSBC had a clear opportunity to improve awareness and education and help more UK customers start investing. But the customer journeys that were working so well in Asia clearly needed rethinking to serve user differences in the UK market.

Here's how we approached the challenge.

• Understanding and segmenting customers. We developed research-based personas to clearly establish who the service should appeal to and support. This provided a basis for addressing the needs, goals, and pain points of three customer groups: those totally new to investing, those a little more informed and curious, and those with investing experience.
• Understanding the problem space. We mapped research findings against the existing customer journeys to uncover opportunities to better serve the business and its different customer sets.
• Development of an MVP. We prioritised the most impactful improvement opportunities and incorporated them into an initial MVP design focused on investment fund selection.
• Ongoing user testing and research. We ran ongoing research and testing together with our research agency and HSBC’s own pool of customer research participants. The quantitative and qualitative research, ranging from large surveys to guerrilla testing, helped us validate assumptions with evidence and test desirability with the target market.
• Improving design and delivery processes. Our team reviewed and optimised mobile service design and delivery processes, with a focus on agility and customer centricity. Improving trust and communication across different disciplines and time zones was key to our success.
• Accessibility testing. We ran user testing with customers with different access needs to ensure compliance, accessibility, and the best possible experience for all users alike.
• Placing content at the heart of the service. Content is key to education and awareness, and so was vital to this project. We worked closely with our content partner to ensure that the service put the right content in front of the right types of customers, at the right stage in their journey.

The results

Our team helped HSBC design a compelling mobile wealth management service for UK customers, allowing them to reap the benefits of smart investing, with the ease and convenience they enjoy in other areas of banking.

As a result of the collaboration, HSBC UK has seen year-on-year growth with new investment business volumes increasing by 93%. Plus, the mobile journey has now become the preferred channel, with over 64% of customers opting to invest with HSBC UK through it.

Overall, the team created a positive and lasting legacy, including improvements to their global design processes and Design Thinking approaches.

The popularity of the new service superseded expectations and fuelled further developments. For example, the recent launch of an investment dashboard and servicing journeys allow customers to track their investments through the HSBC UK mobile banking app.

According to the latest numbers, 55% of customers set up a regular investment through our mobile enhancements. What's more, more than 35,000 customers have interacted with the wealth investment dashboard since its launch to see how their investments are performing.