HSBC Investment App
Project: Turning HSBC's North America banking customers into confident investors, inside the app they already use.
Role: Principal designer and researcher.
Method: Surveys and lean experiments to find the confidence gap, then a concierge funnel to prove demand.
Outcome: A validated opt-in investing funnel. Shipped to production.
Don't guess who's ready. Ask them.
HSBC had millions of banking customers and a reasonable hunch: some of them were ready to invest. The easy move is to infer readiness from banking behavior and start building. We did the opposite. Rather than guess who was ready, we tested it directly and let the answer decide what to build.
The Bet
Confidence, not access, was the barrier. These customers could already open an investment account. What stopped them was not knowing whether they were ready or what to do first. If that was true, the job wasn't to add features. It was to build confidence.
Prove demand before building it. Investing features are expensive to ship. Before committing engineering, we wanted evidence that real customers would opt in, not a roadmap built on a hunch.
Research
Surveys to find the gap. We surveyed existing customers to establish a baseline of investor readiness and, more importantly, to locate the hesitation. The pattern was clear: interest was real, confidence was not.
Younger customers were the opening. The readiness data pointed at a specific audience. Younger banking customers were the realistic conversion group, close enough to investing to move, far enough from confident to need help.
What we shipped
Investing inside the app they already trust. New investing pathways built into the existing HSBC app, so becoming an investor didn't mean going somewhere new.
Budget-aware guidance. Recommendations grounded in a customer's real financial picture, not generic advice, so the first step felt affordable and safe.
A path to real help. Connections to advisors and financial services for the moments confidence wobbles and a person matters more than a screen.
A design system to scale it. New patterns captured in a design system, so the experience stays consistent as it grows and outlasts the release.
Before a line of production code shipped, a lean concierge funnel put the opt-in in front of real customers and drove a 15% lift among the target demographic. The debate was over. In production, the funnel delivered a 10% increase in advisory-services leads and a 6% increase in new brokerage accounts, converting existing HSBC customers into first-time investors instead of buying new ones. That's the sentence that matters in the room where budgets get decided. The design system built alongside it outlasts the release, giving future teams a defined vocabulary for the patterns the app used to lack.