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.
Submerging In Context
HSBC approached us with the challenge to bring investing to its mobile offering, as 64% of their customers were already banking via the app. 389,000 customers under 35 had the necessary funds but lacked confidence — research showed that investing felt inaccessible. The biggest barrier being the feeling of not knowing enough about the topic to get started.
- 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.
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.
Define & Conquer
We built four personas around customer confidence and investment readiness, and focused on the novice and curious segments where education and reassurance had the highest impact.
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.
Ideate & Validate
I facilitated co-creation workshops with stakeholders from product, legal and engineering, then rapidly translated ideas into wireframes and prototypes. Every two weeks we ran user tests to validate hypotheses with real customer data.
Delivery & Launch
Validated prototypes were updated to production-ready screens, leveraging the existing design system and working closely with developers and business analysts to ensure consistent implementation.
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.
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.
