HSBC has made its first foray into the world of open banking, creating a platform that allows its customers to view all their accounts in one place even if they have ones from rival banks.
It is being given a soft launch from which HSBC plans to learn from ahead of releasing a new customer app in 2018.
HSBC Beta comes will a raft of features that allow users to have more digital control over their money.
Safe Balance for example provides an at-a-glance view of the money a customer has before the next payday comes around, while Spend Analysis provides notes, tags and photos to transactions to help people better track their spending and where their money is going.
Digital Coach serves up data-driven insights into how people can spend and save in a more effective fashion, and Goals creates saving targets and comes with tips to suggest how people can hit them.
And finally, Savings Rules helps round up amounts so extra money is saved bit by bit in a person’s savings account.
While the features show how HSBC is taking a feature led, digital app approach to the services it wants to deliver to its customers, the interesting thing about the HSBC Beta platform is that it can accept accounts form 21 different banks such as Santander, Barclays and Lloyds. It will also look at more than just current accounts, and will include loans, mortgages and savings if they are available in online services,
“This joined-up view of your money is just the starting point for new features that will be added to the Beta platform over the coming months,” said Raman Bhatia, head of HSBC’s digital division in the UK and Europe.
“These features were developed to answer specific customer needs, such as joined-up banking, and allows us to examine behaviour in early demos before launching a brand new app to customers early next year.”
However, a cynical view could see this as a way for HSBC to get an insight into how people are spending and saving their money with other banks and use the insights gleaned from that data to offer competitive service and entice customers to have all their banking services under the HSBC banner.
Nevertheless, offering people a single and secure way to view all their accounts could appeal to consumers, as given the complex amount of information pretty much everyone has to deal with on a daily basis, having something that makes that easier is almost certainly a boon.
HSBC appears keen to add more data-focused attributes into its banking and financial operations having recently teamed-up with IBM to create a cognitive trading platform.
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