Case Study: HSBC’S transformation as a bank for small business

The past few years have shown that business banking customers no longer have to wait days or weeks to apply and receive loans to open bank accounts and transact. Many new options are being offered by fintech firms that don’t have to deal with large legacy technology stacks and legacy thinking. This frees them up to focus on servicing small business needs and delivering good banking experiences. Large incumbent banks don’t have this luxury.

HSBC Kinetic is a bold move by the 6th largest bank in the world. It’s an app-only digital bank servicing small businesses, but for the financial institution established in the 1860s, it’s much more than that. With Kinetic, HSBC is building experience in agile development environments, in the cloud, and with a branchless app that offers automated onboarding, in-app overdrafts, a controllable debit card and a range of personal financial management budgeting and cashflow tools.

The following was produced by Tearsheet Studios. We worked with fintech software provider Strands to create a visual and audio case study about HSBC’s transformation as a bank for small businesses.

Working with Strands, Kinetic built a powerful transaction categorization engine within HSBC that is aligned to the UK’s tax office. By categorizing those transactions, the business bank saves its customers days every month trying to manually reconcile what category spending should fall under.

Customers get a cleaner view of where they spend their money. With some additional analytics, Kinetic gives customers a monthly breakdown of the changes in their spending per category.

Additionally, Kinetic uses Strands to take business finance management up a level by building personalized insights for customers. The bank’s smart engine analyzes spending trends to understand all the bills a small business has coming up in the next few weeks to tell it whether it’s likely to hit zero or go into my overdraft. From here, the app gives business customers options to take relevant actions.

A customer can top up his account from another bank or can cancel a payment, amend the payment, or reschedule it for a later date. Or if you need funding, HSBC has options which customers can access straight through the app.

Download the case study to learn

• Why HSBC created a new brand — Kinetic — to service small and medium businesses
• What HSBC learned about small businesses’ needs after speaking to 3000 of them
• What Kinetic, a digital bank without branches, says about the future of the 170 year old banking institution
• How the bank offers services not traditionally offered by financial institutions to best serve its clients

Download the Case Study: HSBC’S transformation as a bank for small business