• Research uncovers lack of confidence in investing

• New app design leads to a 93% increase in new investment business volumes between 2021 and 2022

• Zühlke collaboration enhances mobile service design and delivery processes

HSBC provides retail banking and wealth management products to around 14 million UK customers.

With customers impacted by rising inflation, a big focus for HSBC and the UK mobile banking team is helping more customers get started with investing.

For HSBC, it’s an opportunity to deliver superior experiences that better serve customers’ changing expectations around banking services and support.

For customers, investing can be a very effective way to grow personal savings. While the value of any investment can fall as well as rise, investing can be an attractive alternative or addition to low-interest current and savings accounts.

That’s why HSBC wants to empower UK mobile customers to understand the basics of investing and get started with just £50.  

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 customer research and insights showed that Asia and the UK have very different customer attitudes towards investing. A different approach would be needed to create a compelling and user-friendly service for the UK market.

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.