THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

“The market dictates those expectations. I expect to access an intuitive web journey or download an app to join the bank and if we can’t offer that, then we’re failing.” CTO Bennie adds on top of Robson’s customer focus. Both business leaders believe this scenario is consistent across traditional retail banking through wealth management.

Bennie adds that he joined HSBC because of the opportunity to be part of "a massive transition to customer centricity and to make sure we are doing the right thing by our customers.” Bennie doesn’t mean that HSBC was not customer focused before, but that HSBC aims to ensure moving to digital methods is consistently customer focused and not just about the technology.

“The customer needs to spend, save and borrow, not do banking,” he adds, explaining that the Originations team works through a myriad of use cases, such as opening a joint account, taking out a loan and all the different variations across markets. When the team has understood the customer problem and the digital ways to resolve it, they look at how that solution can be replicated. “There are endless nuances,” CTO Bennie says. 

Future customers are most likely to be young; and with challengers and purely digital banks constantly entering the market, HSBC is well aware of the importance of the next generation of customers, as well as its existing customer base and their differing uses of online banking.

“Get the foundation right and we’ll be in a really good place,” Bennie says of creating a great digital experience. 

“We gave ourselves six months to get this new approach off the ground, we quickly realized it was working and in the following months we had validated thin slices with effective pipelines, APIs that integrated through the stack and new data flows – soon after we could scale up the organization. Now after three years we have over 20 teams in six locations who all operate in the same way,” Bennie says of how the short sprints of development and continuous delivery cycles have become a de facto operating model in Canada, India, and Poland as well as the UK operations.

“The success this model can have is exciting as it breeds a culture that fulfills itself and perpetuates,” the CTO says. “What I love about what we have created is that people have a sense of ownership and pride in what they have delivered.”

One tip Bennie shares with fellow CIOs and CTOs is: “We don’t deploy software on a Friday, the risk is too great, and all the teams here understand that the focus is all about the customer.”

The success of the Originations team is not just about using digital industry methods of delivery, Robson and Bennie are clear that HSBC has worked tirelessly on ensuring the injection of new skills and experiences work closely with “bank and customer domain knowledge.”

“We have struck that balance really well,” the CTO says.

“The balance doesn’t work unless you have a leadership environment that provides empowerment and if you do, you can build a truly cross functional team,” Robson adds.

“In the first 18 months we had a lot of internal visitors and people were intrigued, but once our teams had matured, we didn’t need to explain it anymore, we just supported them and let the delivery do the talking.” Bennie says of how a cultural change can grow.