Overview
HSBC was looking to converge and reimagine personal investing within their primary personal banking app. Our team was tasked with defining the key personas and developing solutions that would result in converting banking customer into investment services customers.
Deliverables
Customer Research
Experience Strategy & Roadmap
Lean Experimentation
App Design & Development
Helping banking customers start their journey as investors.
Although previous versions of the HSBC Personal Banking app featured budgeting and investments tools, we discovered that customers rarely converted into investment customers. Our goal was to discover what were the key challenges customer face when considering investment services, and what would be needed to get them to select HSBC investment tools.
Discovery
Our intercept survey revealed that 43% of banking customers couldn't accurately estimate their monthly net income without manually calculating for several minutes, creating a significant barrier to investment planning. Through interviews with 30+ participants across different income levels, the team discovered that users wanted a simple, automated way to visualize their true disposable income after all expenses. Behavioral analysis showed that users who clearly understood their net income were 3x more likely to begin investing within 60 days compared to those relying on rough estimates.
Synthesis & Problem Framing
Themes emerged from the discovery phase - the key problems to solve for customers was helping them feel prepared with relevant information about their own financial picture. One of the key concerns for customers was not knowing how money they could commit to investing on a monthly basis. We formed a hypothesis we could test with current customers.
Experimentation
Our proposed solution involved simplifying the budgeting and guidance tools by giving customers a view of their budgetary cashflow ”burn” per month. Customers with positive cashflow would get personalized messaging and invitations to connect with a financial advisor, review investment options, or open an investment account. Before implementing we wanted to validate if this feature drive action among our current customers. We designed an experiment to allow us to see the measurable impact we could make to converting banking customers into investment customers.
Results
Like many commercial banks that offer investment services, HSBC is experiencing a new surge in investment interest while needing to maintaining a high-level of trust with banking customers. Enrollment in HSBC investment accounts increased 7% since the launch of this experiment. Interest in financial planning tools and services increase over 25%.
