Designing HSBC's Award-Winning Mobile Investment Product
Bringing investing to HSBC customer's fingertips through research-driven design and achieving a 93% increase in new investment business.
Project Summary
I designed HSBC's first-ever mobile investment journey for the UK market, achieving customer engagement numbers 4x higher than the initial business goal. The design focused on educating customers about investing in order to empower them to overcome their initial lack of confidence and help them make their money work harder.
Impact & Results
- The mobile investment journey vastly exceeded internal customer acquisition targets.
- The success of the project fuelled further development such as the launch of an investment dashboard which I was fortunate enough to partially kickstart.
- Beyond the app launch, we improved the bank's internal design processes for delivery optimisation with focus on agility and customer centricity as well as improving communication and trust across different disciplines.
year-on-year.
This mobile investment journey won the prestigious "Innovation In Digital Banking" award — validating the design and research effort that turned a complex financial activity into a clear, trusted, and popular mobile experience. Democratising investing by making it accessible and customer-centric.
The Way There
HSBC approached us with the challenge to bring investing to its mobile offering. While many existing customers banked via their app already and had the necessary funds, they showed a significant lack of confidence to get started with investing.
Submerging In Context
To discover responsible barriers and mitigate the risk of developing a solution that didn't address real user needs, we conducted extensive user research, which gave us the following insights into the problem:
- The current economic climate is challenging with rising inflation and saving rates historically low.
- There is a strong belief investing is only for the wealthy. More than 50% of the target group said in online surveys that they believe they don't have enough money to invest.
- Almost 70% of the target customers say investing is difficult to navigate and they don't know enough about it to start.
- Customers are very risk averse. Assessing risk and understanding the various levels of risk is a big obstacle.
- 389,000 customers under 35 have sufficient funds to start investing but are currently not doing so.
- 64% of the bank's customers already bank via the mobile app.
- People interested in investing prefer to do so with their existing bank who they already trust.
- Want to stay competitive and fulfil customer expectations.
- Highly regulated space with complex compliance requirements.
Our research revealed that the lack in knowledge posed the biggest barrier to investing.
There was a clear opportunity for HSBC to empower its mobile customers by first helping them understand the basics of investing and then allowing them to get started with a very small amount of money.
Deliverables
- Problem Analysis
- Competitor & Market Analysis
- Ways of Working Setup
- Product Design Strategy
- Research Execution, Analysis and Summary
Define & Conquer
Based on our research outcomes, we created four personas to represent customer confidence levels and investment readiness. We strategically focused on the novice and curious investor segments, where education and reassurance would have the highest impact.
focusing on?
Novice Investors
- Young professionals in their 20s
- Live in the UK
- Need an easy way to familiarise themselves with investing
- Discuss advantages of investment with friends and family
Curious Investors
- Professionals in their mid 30s
- Live in the UK
- Want to continuously learn more about investing
- Know to start early and how much to invest
Customer journey mapping helped us to map our research findings against existing journeys and uncover further opportunities for improvement, as well as identifying where the journeys had to differ, to cater to different customer segments and their specific use cases.
By synthesising all our research findings in this way we were able to define the core problem and develop actionable insights to shape the design and content strategy.
We defined that educational content was key to building understanding and confidence throughout the service journey.
Based on this, we started to work closely with our content partner, ensuring that the right guidance was placed in front of the right customers at the right moment in their investment journey, all while simplifying unnecessarily complex terminology, growing customers financial literacy.
Deliverables
- Research-based Personas
- Customer Journey Maps
- Problem Statement
- Storyboards
- Technical & Regulatory Approval
Ideate & Validate
I facilitated several creative co-creation workshops with stakeholders from all relevant departments to ideate and prioritise ideas. Involving the legal and engineering teams proved especially valuable, as their views and expertise opened up new perspectives and considerations.
Following the workshops, I rapidly translated ideas into wireframes and prototypes, allowing us to quickly iterate and validate hypotheses about potential solutions with real user feedback.
Every two weeks we conducted user tests in form of scripted experiments/scenarios to validate our hypotheses. These were either early drafts or high fidelity prototypes depending on the stage of the project. (Usually 6 participants, 1 hour each)
Every 2–3 weeks we sent out online surveys to a selected group of customers.
Through an iterative loop of qualitative and quantitative user testing, validating solutions with real user data, we refined the designs, ensuring we addressed key user needs, such as debunking investment myths, growing financial literacy and improving customer's confidence in investing.
Deliverables
- Workshop Facilitation
- User Flows
- Rapid Prototyping & Testing
- Online Surveys
- Stakeholder Alignment
Delivery & Launch
This phase involved meticulous refinement, rigorous testing, and the final implementation of the design, resulting in a successful product launch.
I updated validated prototypes to production-ready screens, leveraging the provided design system to ensure consistency and brand identity. Close collaboration including extensive back-and-forth with developers and business analysts ensured constant alignment between teams and the seamless implementation of the design.
The final outcome of this initial service proposition was the development and launch of an engaging and user-friendly mobile investment product, the scope of which was validated by research and testing to target the most impactful improvement areas, now empowering thousands of customers to start investing and driving new business value.
Deliverables
- Screen Flows
- UI Designs
- Legal, IT and Accessibility Approvals
- Design System Contributions
- Development Handover
Not The End.
Beyond launch, we monitored performance, gathered user feedback, and iterated on the design, expanding features to continuously enhance the product for future releases.
My Personal Highlight
Among many others, witnessing the legal team's unexpected enthusiasm for creative exercises like Crazy 8s was an amazing surprise — and a testament to the collaborative spirit of the project.
It's a reminder that good design process isn't just for designers. When given the space and the right framing, people from any background can tap into their creativity — and often surprise you with the most unexpected, delightful ideas.
