Customer experience management


Though HSBC still has a significant footprint of physical branches, it is also investing heavily in digital offerings.


Yusuf Demiral, head of data analytics and customer relationship management,


wealth and personal banking, HSBC.


matters to us’ voice memos – is liable to leave you curled up raving about jackbooted hordes of office furniture. Yet someone must try all the same, for if modern banking data is bewildering, it has the power to change the sector forever. Yusuf Demiral knows these tensions better than most. As the wealth and personal banking head of data analytics and customer relationship management at HSBC, he must grapple with those 4.8 billion filing cabinets for real, all while attempting to derive meaning from a mire of numbers and figures and stats. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Demiral sees his task as one “where science meets art,” requiring what he calls an “iterative process” to separate mere ‘noise’ from genuinely useful insights. As this comment implies, moreover, getting to grips with so much information involves more than pure maths. Rather, it obliges Demiral and his team to carefully manage wildly different data sets – and consider what exactly they want their information to tell them. It goes without saying that none of this is easy. But from client budgeting to call centres, it’s transforming how HSBC does business, with revolutionary consequences for the sector more widely.


Going big Talking to Demiral, it’s sometimes hard to know where HSBC’s snowdrift of data truly began. Did it grow out of new financial services like credit cards or ATMs? Or were more recent digital technologies the sneeze that began the avalanche? The answer is probably a mixture of the two: but what can be in doubt is just how much information the bank now has. “Understandably, we have access to a plethora of data,” is how Demiral laconically puts it, with that headline 240 petabyte figure merely the start. That’s true, for instance, of client demographic data, or else their transaction histories. Individual clickstreams –


Future Banking / www.nsbanking.com


the specific series of links that a customer clicks on – are a major dataset too. Nor should financial transactions be forgotten; HSBC processes around two trillion of them each year. It goes without saying, meanwhile, that all this information needs to be stored somewhere, and once again, the scale of HSBC’s operation can be hard to grasp. Encompassing data centres across 21 countries, the bank overall maintains 94,000 distinct servers. Combined with the rising power of the cloud – which last year represented 27% of the bank’s workflows – and Demiral’s use of “plethora” feels apt. Yet if the scope of HSBC’s data is all-encompassing, it’s ultimately not there to sound impressive. “Each data point acts like a signal,” Demiral emphasises. “I like to think of them as a mine that needs to be carefully refined and thoughtfully converted into useful insights; only then can we use data for commercial purposes, for a value exchange with our customers.” A case in point, the executive continues, involves payment data. By analysing how clients spend their money, for instance, HSBC can offer practical tips on how to manage it, all while cutting frustrations like managing passwords. For that to happen, however, HSBC’s data analytics team must first deal with all that ‘noise’ – for a bank as large as Demiral’s a veritable orchestra of sound. In part, his job is made easier thanks to clever data technology developments, as well as the fact that different datasets can be played off against each other. At the same time, HSBC staff are obliged to think carefully on what exactly they want their data to tell them. Once again, payment information offers a good example here. A personal financial management tool, the HSBC HK app uses data from the bank’s Hong Kong customers to help them budget. With that in mind, the app carefully separates everyday expenses from personal investment transfers, making it easier


240 1.8


million The number of


people using the HSBC HK budgeting app.


$2bn HSBC 29


petabytes


HSBC’s estimated data footprint in 2020. That’s the equivalent of 4.8 billion filing cabinets of information.


The current cost to banks after US regulators discovered staff were using unauthorised devices and messaging platforms.


ADRIAN3388/Shutterstock.com


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