Customer experience management
“I believe the bank of the future will embrace the best of technology and humans coming together for better service and experiences – the perfect combination of face-to-face services combined with data intelligence fuelled digital interactions.”
for users to appreciate where their money is going. In a similar vein, the system also categorises costs by type – dining is one, shopping is another – ensuring clients can understand exactly how much their lunches are setting them back.
Positive chains
If customers in Hong Kong are dramatically exploiting their data – the service now has 1.8 million users – they’re far from alone. Teaming up Google, for example, HSBC has set up an ‘Automated Quality Monitoring’ (AQM) system to track the bank’s call centres. Leaning on a sophisticated AI solution, it checks that HSBC staff explain the terms and conditions of particular products correctly. Traditionally, Demiral notes, this process has been manual, with overworked personnel obliged to listen in on certain conversations. But by relying on a tireless robotic alternative, Demiral says the bank’s been able to expand coverage to 100% of calls, along the way eliminating “human effort” and errors. This approach obviously bolsters the average punter’s user experience: the moment the machine spots an error, a call agent can immediately contact them to resolve the problem. But as Demiral reference to “human effort” implies, the thoughtful use of data can also make life easier inside HSBC as well. For one thing, the AI’s vigilance means that muddled staff can immediately be coached on the correct terminology. For another, it saves HSBC from spot
HSBC’s apps are designed with accessibility and transparency in mind.
checking calls at random. That’s of a piece, Demiral argues, with how data can prove useful to staff more widely. As he puts it: “It’s a chain of positive events – in simple terms: better customer experience and services makes more happy customers, which equals better commercial outcomes, as the bank gains trust and positive recommendations from customers.” In a broader sense, Demiral suggests removing manual drudgery can promote staff morale – perhaps an obvious suggestion to anyone who’s listened to the average customer service call.
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Not that data can – or should – sweep all before it. As always when it comes to customer information, and especially sensitive financial data, HSBC must ensure that it’s employed ethically. “Banking,” Demiral stresses, “is the business of trust.” Given this, it’s no wonder that the bank has developed a detailed, publicly available guide, explaining precisely how its billions of filing cabinets can be used. That’s shadowed by more practical work. In 2020, for instance, the HSBC liased with the Monetary of Authority of Singapore to understand how various statistical methods can lead to implicit bias. That’s echoed by a partnership with the Alan Turing Institute, which among other things pondered how the bank could be open about its data while also keeping it secure.
Generation generative
Demiral is clearly proud of this work – as he says, HSBC was among the first banks to publicly state its ethical principles towards big data and AI. But if it’s not the only financial institution to suffer here, it’s also true that HSBC’s record of data protection is far from perfect. In late 2018, staff admitted that the private information of some US customers had been compromised. More recently, bankers at HSBC, alongside colleagues at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, have been accused of using WhatsApp inappropriately. To put it simply, American officials are worried about WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, meaning it may be difficult to recover pertinent messages in the event of insider trading or fraud. At the time of writing, HSBC was in the process of finalising a settlement with regulators – and given penalties across the sector have so far hit $2bn, any deal is unlikely to be cheap. These challenges aside, however, Demiral seems buoyant about how data can transform life on both sides of HSBC’s threshold. “I believe the bank of the future will embrace the best of technology and humans coming together for better service and experiences – the perfect combination of the face-to- face services combined with data intelligence fuelled digital interactions.” By way of example, Demiral highlights generative AI. A fair point: typified by tools like ChatGPT, it could soon be training automated models everywhere from stress-testing to fraud detection, with Demiral arguing it has the potential to support HSBC front-end staff and offer “hyper- personalisation” to their customers. All the while, that horde of virtual filing cabinets just grows and grows and grows. ●
Future Banking /
www.nsbanking.com
HSBC
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