Hyper-personalisation critical for banks

Bojan Obradović, group head of Innovation and Digital Partnerships at HSBC

Advancements in AI and enabling capabilities have made it possible to harness large amounts of data, understand customers better and offer more personalised products and services.

And that’s what customers expect. They’re used to being offered personalised content and services on platforms such as YouTube, Netflix, and Taobao, and on social media, that really tap into their needs and interests.

This expectation will increase. During the next decade, there’s going to be one of the largest generational transfers of wealth in history. The way this first-ever digital native generation interact with financial services will fundamentally differ to the generations of customers that came before.

At the same time, the use of agentic AI will increase – and this will bring transformative change to hyper-personalisation in banking. We’re moving from a model where individuals conduct their own research to make decisions, to a model where individuals set high-level objectives and empower AI agents to execute on their behalf. Ultimately, this moves banking beyond simply predicting needs with features on a screen, towards a model of proactive, invisible, autonomous financial stewardship.

The financial services industry has to keep up with these changing habits and trends. Hyper-personalisation is a megatrend that’s become critical to all types of financial institutions, whether a digital bank or a large global bank like HSBC – albeit the approach will differ.

Harnessing data

At HSBC, we’re strategically investing in hyper-personalisation by using AI to equip our teams with richer insights, enabling them to offer a more personalised service with a human touch.

I believe that a truly hyper-personalised service can only be provided when technology and humans work together.

If you think about HSBC, a 161-year-old bank built on trust and embedded across many parts of the world, we’re large not only in our physical footprint, but also in the scale of our technology infrastructure.

We have hundreds of petabytes of data distributed across all types of systems that are varied in their size and scale.

And that’s what we’re focusing on – harnessing the power and the depth of data that we have, which newer digital banks are not going to have.

We’ve introduced a range of hyper-personalisation innovations for our customers, including a budget feature in our Hong Kong mobile banking app that tracks spending patterns and offers actionable advice on budgeting and services tailored to our customers' financial goals and behaviours.

Photo: Shutterstock

Supercharging colleagues

In addition to building exceptional personalised digital journeys, and because of the wealth of resources that we have, the one unique difference in our approach to digital banks will be in our ability to combine technology and human expertise.

We’re supercharging our relationship managers with this technology so they’re able to provide that personalised human touch with greater insight to our customers.

We’ve introduced a suite of in-house technology initiatives spanning GenAI, analytics, digital investment platforms, and productivity tools for frontline colleagues.

As we continue to invest in hyper-personalisation, we’re confident that this approach will strengthen our client relationships and reinforce the trust that has defined HSBC for generations.

By blending technology with human expertise, we’re helping our customers achieve their financial goals, today and in the future.

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