Financial Services
Don't guess who's ready. Ask them.
A spec concept for turning HSBC’s North America banking customers into confident investors, inside the app they already use. Built in collaboration as a proposal for HSBC’s open redesign contract.
OUTCOME
A spec prototype, a validation plan, and a sharper playbook for RFPs and stakeholder conversations
ROLE
Principal designer and researcher on a small collaborative team
METHOD
Hypothesis framing, a spec prototype, and a validation plan built around a concierge funnel
INDUSTRY
Financial
This was spec work. HSBC opened a redesign contract, and I partnered with a small team on a proposal for it. 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. Our proposal argued for the opposite. Rather than guess who was ready, test 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. Our hypothesis was that 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. We wanted HSBC to see evidence that real customers would opt in before committing engineering, not a roadmap built on a hunch.
How we’d prove it
Surveys to find the gap. We proposed surveying existing customers to set a baseline of investor readiness and, more importantly, to find exactly where the hesitation lives. Our bet was that interest would be real and confidence would not.
Younger customers as the opening. We focused the concept on younger banking customers as the most realistic conversion group: close enough to investing to move, far enough from confident to need help.
What we proposed
Investing inside the app they already trust. New investing pathways designed into the existing HSBC app, so becoming an investor wouldn’t mean going somewhere new.
Budget-aware guidance. Recommendations grounded in a customer’s real financial picture, not generic advice, so the first step feels 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 could stay consistent as it grows.
Proof before production. A lean concierge funnel to put the opt-in in front of real customers before any production code, so HSBC could learn cheaply whether the target audience would actually say yes.