Image Credit : HSBC HK
Project Overview
At HSBC, our aim is to make banking simple and seamless so that our customers can focus on building their wealth, and achieving their financial goals. We realised that our traditional account opening process is time-consuming, taking on average 45–90 minutes to complete. With the Covid pandemic, we also wanted to help our customers and staff stay safe at home whilst still ensuring their banking needs are met.The rise of virtual banks, and the increasing sophistication in our digital lifestyle also mean that our offerings needed to stay competitive.
HSBC HK saw an opportunity to completely transform the way our customers start their banking relationship with us. Our answer – launching the HSBC HK Digital Onboarding journey on the HSBC HK app.
With the insights from customer research and service design, our customers can now:
- Complete the application process in around 5 minutes
- Use biometric technology to immediately validate their identity
- Reduce input error with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capability
- Benefit from the convenience of predictive text capability
- Gain instant approval where applicable
- Immediately register for digital banking
- Open a bank account completely remotely
This innovative new journey has capably balanced our customers’ needs, our bank’s risk and regulatory requirements. It also delivers on our vision to bring an omnichannel best-in-class onboarding experience with our customers using our 5-minute mobile onboarding experience: whether it’s in our branches, assisted by our staff; or wherever they are in Hong Kong.
Organisation
Team
We have a small internal studio of designers at HSBC HK, including UI/UX designers. We also work very closely with our banking colleagues in Hong Kong to ensure that we marry up business and design needs to serve our HK customers.
Project Brief
The Design team at HSBC were given a robust brief by the business to design an account opening journey for our customers in Hong Kong.
The points that we needed to address were:
- Using the customer insights and feedback available to answer and anticipate our customers’ needs
- Making the journey easy to understand so that our customers can complete this without any assistance
- Taking into account the space available on a mobile screen, how we can best position every element of our journey – including any variations that we needed to note for iOS versus Android
- Helping our customers understand where they are in the process at each stage of the application
- Lowering the risk of customers abandoning the journey due to lack of information available, or frustration with questions
- Minimizing the effort required from our customers to complete the application
- Ensuring that all requirements from a Bank and regulatory perspective were addressed whilst maintaining a smooth customer experience
This is our only chance to make a first impression with new customers – we need to ensure that it’s something that will delight our customers, and give them confidence in HSBC.
Project Need
Our vision is to offer the best-in-class mobile-first onboarding experience to all our customers. This means uplifting the experience and transform not only our user interface but also the end to end user experience.
We realised that our traditional account opening process is time-consuming, taking on average 45 – 90 minutes to complete.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, we also wanted to help our customers and staff stay safe at home whilst still ensuring their banking needs are met.
The rise of virtual banks, and the increasing sophistication in our digital lifestyle also mean that our offerings needed to stay competitive. Our customers are increasingly preferring and reliant on their mobile devices to manage their lives - and banking is no exception. We need to ensure that our journey is built to work in our mobile banking app.
We also wanted to help our customers become engaged with our digital banking services, so that they can continue to easily keep track of their finances or apply for further products.
User Experience
As the Experience Design team for HSBC, our goal was to start a digital relationship with our customers in the most seamless way possible and answering every element of our project brief. We made thorough use of our research and put ourselves in our customers’ shoes. We don’t start an interaction by showing you legal documents and vague questions in person, so why would we digitally? We’ve designed our journey to feel more like a conversation you’d be having with a member of staff, cutting through jargon. Questions are placed in a conversational order, spread out over multiple screens. This helps customers stay focused on what’s important and know where they are in the process. We also removed all questions that aren’t really needed and pre-fill questions by scanning the identification document. Customer effort is minimized, making the overall process much quicker, lowering the risk of abandonment. We went to great lengths to make this digital journey accessible to everyone, as we want this to be fully useable on a mobile device. We made important changes such as contrast ratios, screen reader optimization and the removal of physical signatures. To help our customers stay engaged, we also added fun illustrations and animations to the project. Illustrations can quickly explain complex processes, reassure customers that they’re doing the right thing and makes the overall journey feel less formal – yet conveying the information our customers need to open an account with us.
Project Marketing
To commercialize and market our digital on-boarding, we promoted this journey as part of our acquisition campaigns for our HSBC Premier and HSBC One account products.
We encourage our customers to use the HSBC HK Mobile Banking app to open their HSBC account in just a few simple steps and in less than 5 minutes. This was particularly cogent during the height of Covid-19 restrictions, when it was difficult for our customers to come to a branch.
Where applicable, we’ve also offered a top-up incentive (e.g. additional HKD200 rebate) to customers if they open the account through this new digital journey instead of going to a branch.
The campaigns used a wide range of channels including social media, press release, our website and below-the-line materials. Popular HK celebrities and Key Opinion Leaders were also featured to drive awareness and boost acquisition. This resulted in a significant media exposure and press coverage in Hong Kong.
The results were astounding. We saw a significant uptake from our customers, with a high percentage of eligible customers choosing to open their account with us via our mobile journey. We also saw that this journey was particularly popular among our younger customer segment, showing that our mobile solution is the best way to help serve them.
Almost all of our new customers from this journey have gone to become digitally active.
Project Privacy
Security is a top priority for HSBC. Our HSBC HK Mobile Banking app is built with 128-bit Transport Layer Security encryption technology, which is an industry standard for encryption over the internet to protect data, in the secure area of the app.
When customers use this journey, we will collect relevant data to process their application for an account with us. We may store the data locally or overseas, including in the cloud. We apply our global data standards and policies wherever your data is stored. HSBC are responsible for keeping data safe in compliance with Hong Kong law. Customers may request access to the data we store.
We will use the data to provide products and services to our customers, including credit checks where applicable. It also helps us to comply with requirements or requests that we, or the HSBC group have or receive such as legal or regulatory in or outside Hong Kong.
In line with our regulatory requirements, and to help with identity verification, we may also share your data with local or overseas bodies or authorities such as legal, regulatory, law enforcement, government and tax and any partnerships between law enforcement and the financial sector.
We also have dedicated teams to monitor our compliance with data privacy policies.
For more information on our privacy notice, please visit: https://www.hsbc.com.hk/misc/data-privacy-notice/
Digital - New Service or Application
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