HSBC: Banking on the Network

HSBC are pretty transparent these days about their strategies, as can be seen from their investor relations webcasts and presentation downloads.

Also, as mentioned last week, I had a visit to a firm using video technologies who sent me a webcast of Ken Harvey, Chief Technology and Services Officer (CTSO) discussing the bank as a network in a presentation earlier this month.

Here is a summary of what he said, for those who don’t have half an hour to spare to watch the video:

We spend $6 billion a year on technology, and recently embarked on a multi-billion dollar, multi-year project to become an IP Bank.  We are now three years into this five year project, and the aim of the project is to generate more capital.  In fact, we are making money out of this implementation, creating more capital than we are consuming.

To illustrate this, HSBC has 300,000 employees, a third of which work in HSBC Tech and Services (HTS) supporting 9,500 offices across 85 countries. Our aim is to reduce IT costs by at least 10% per year and, in 2007, we achieved a 14% reduction with the extra 4% then used to invest in innovation. We spend around a third of our IT budget on innovation.

We also have to compete harder as a global bank. For example, I have 5 offices in the radius of this conference location, whilst my American competitors have 26 or more. As a result, I have to use the network to leverage against them.

We can do this because we just add another office onto the network.

The result is that we can move into a new country with credit cards with an investment of $1-$2 million, mainly on marketing, because we don’t have to build all that infrastructure.

We can move into a country with full service banking for under $10 million, which is a fraction of our competitors.

We just open a building and sell, because everything is delivered through the network. We just need local compliance.

There are no local data centres or servers, just access to the HSBC network.

That leverages our global distribution cross-border and cross-country and our cost-efficiency improves as a result.

For example, five years ago, we ran 130 data centres because we had acquired 50 companies up to 2003. Today, we have 20 data centres, and in two years we will have 6 worldwide.

They are all brought together through the network and this gives us more resilience, because we can come into a country from different network points. If an earthquake or bombing blows one part of the network, we can support that country or city from another part of the network.

This is why we run our own network - the largest, privately owned network in the world.

We lease lines, but the rest we own and run.

We run email, video conferencing, music and telephony, through the same network lines as a stock trade or FX trade or financial transaction, although the latter always gets priority.

Every laptop and PC is loaded from the network too. It took two years to build all that and we’re now putting applications on the network on top of that.

This reduces barriers to entry and improves the customer experience and cost efficiency, as well as carbon offsets.

Every application is written as though you were using it for the internet, although everyone wants it to be different.

They claim that branch, ATM or customer applications are not the same as internet applications.

Resisting all of that pressure to be different is a challenge but you see considerable savings by doing so.

For example, it used to take us two days to train someone how to open an investment account for a customer in a branch. Now customers open the accounts themselves in three minutes, and staff training has gone down massively.

The internet and intranet become one.

There is no difference between the customer and staff network user, and everything must be developed that way.

Every application and transaction has been rewritten that way over the last three years, and now 80% of our applications work this way, the high volume applications, with 90% by the end of next year.

In every market IP telephony pays in 12-18 months because costs have come down for IP so much.

By way of illustration, the average branch has two fax lines, a 56kbps modem and five telephone lines. They all get blended down to one line through IP and eight telephone lines become one, running over the same network as our financial transactions, our email, our videos and our music.

This does even better in emerging markets where telco’s are less competitive. So this pays for itself on just the IT operations alone, and the cost savings therein.

Then you can look for things that help customers too and it gets even better.

I could not justify that area to our board – the customer benefits – but the operational savings give me that investment, and then you see the payback is in spades, because it gives you savings and customer experience improvements too.

For example, we did digital signage.

Signage in a branch from marketing, putting out paper placards, taking old ones down and putting new ones up … all that has a cost. So we put a digital placard there, and that can immediately match what we are doing on the internet, on TV and across all media. We can do that marketing change simultaneously, and change signage in every branch globally in real-time immediately.

We went a bit too far with that one by the way, when we placed passive RFID chips in customer’s charge cards. When they walked past branches they’d get a tailored advertisement in the branch window in their language.

For example, in Tokyo it’d change from Japanese to English if an American tourist was walking by, and the customer would go “how does it do that?” 

It freaked customers out for a bit, as they spent more time trying to work out how it worked than buying into the ad.

But it does mean that for people who are travelling, they get everything in their own language.

You call and get routed to the right language speaker. Your internet access automatically comes up in your language. And as you walk into a branch, all the signs change to your language.

This move take-up rates and sales from signage up from 1% to 4% or even 5% as a result. You also get to know what works, as they see the sign and buy the product there and then.  It’s all tied together.

Our new branches therefore have less people because of this.

Another example of the power of our network is HSBC Premier.

The HSBC Premier account gives customers transparent access to their global accounts in multiple currencies. That’s the power of the network. We launched that in 2007, and got as many customers in the first half of 2008 as the whole of 2007.

The coolest feature here is that you can make cross-border transfers for no fee in real time. No-one else can do that, as other banks have to make a wire transfer with a 24 hour delay and a $50 fee.

It gets even better for the corporate customer, because we allow corporate treasurers to manage their global currencies in a single book.

The old world would mean taking a hedge overnight on fund transfer changes, but HSBCNet gives 40,000 large corporates – names you would all know – the ability to transfer funds five minutes before the close of day, moving money around in real-time between accounts. No phone calls and no three days for taking positions – just do the whole thing in screen shots.

That’s the power of the network, because this product is the network giving real-time treasury, real-time payments with real-time information.

We were awarded equal first ratings for online banking by Greenwich Associates because of this. Greenwich is like Nielsen for banking, and five years ago we didn’t even figure in their survey.

That's the power of the bank as a network.

Last but not least, we get environmental impacts.

We have cut down huge numbers of machines through virtualisation, and power usage represents 6% of my total IT costs, up from 1.5% five years ago, so this is important.

By 2010, our carbon dioxide will be down 5%, electricity usage down 7%, water consumption by 7%, and waste down 8% compared to 2005.

That's a major environmental impact.

We also have video in all of our major hubs – Dubai, NY, HK, London – and this reduces corporate wear and tear because I’m now at home 12 days per month. I can see and interact with my staff and clients any time.

Now I have to get up at 3:00 in the morning for a meeting, but it saves me three days getting to and from HK for that meeting and if your meetings are on a Monday morning you miss a lot of weekends so our executives are all in there using it.

The senior core team – the twelve managers who run the bank – now run three-quarters of their monthly budget planning meetings through video. All were in person before. The travel cost savings alone pay for the rooms and the implementation, but the quality of life factor is also key. For example, we will see a 15% reduction in travel next year, so there’s another technology that pays for itself.

Similarly, 80% of staff now do their training by iPod, rather than at their desks. They download from our servers whilst in branches and learn whilst commuting. This means they are doing it on their time, and going to work whilst working.

All in all, by being the bank on the network, our customers describe us as “forward thinking”, “hi tech” and “visionary” … words that weren’t ever being used before, so this has transformed the bank.

Comments

[Dave Birch]

"Today, we have 20 data centres, and in two years we will have 6 worldwide."

Let's hope no data cable linking continents get cut then. Oh, wait...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7792688.stm