The aging platform needs to revamp to serve evolving customer needs
Currently, the HSBC bond trading is aged and fail to cope with modern day service offerings and customer experience.
To stay upfront in Hong Kong and also the emerging Greater Bay Area (GBA) We need to provide a best in class Bond trading experience to stay up front in the competition.
Research Round 1: To discover the bond buying journey
HSBC wanted to understand the end-to-end journey of how customers in Hong Kong carry out research, search for and purchase bonds. They also wanted to understand specifically how important filtering and sorting are when customers are searching for bonds to invest in.
Conducted 6x 1on1 interviews with the customers to learn why they purchase bonds, how to discover a product, and make buying or selling decisions.
We conducted 6 x 60 minute sessions with existing Jade, and higher purchasing power Premier Account customers, who have at least 3 years of bond investment experience. The sessions, conducted in Cantonese, consisted of an interview, a usability test and feature prioritization exercise.
Key findings: Half of the participants rely on RM, and all of them do their research on the internet and use apps for stock investment.
Bond investment interview
All participants managed a diverse range of investment products in their portfolio, aimed at maximising their return while balancing the risks. As well as bonds and stocks, many had mutual funds, foreign exchange and some CBBCs, warrants and unit trusts.
Relationship Managers play an essential role in the investment process. Half of the participants valued them.
Most gained knowledge about bonds from their Relationship Manager, friends & family, newspapers & financial press, news & analysis on TV, as well as Google and YouTube
Relationship Managers’ advice was valued by half, though most would prefer to buy directly via computer or app.
Once invested, most would only compare their existing bonds with potential new bonds, by eye, if they were looking to make a further investment. When comparing, ‘yield to maturity’, along with tenor and risk were key.
Participants prefer the user experience app from fin-tech, e.g. Futu and interactive broker, but choose HSBC on significant size investment.
Most preferred the Interactive Broker, Futu and BrightSmart apps as they were simple, quick and had lower fees than other platforms.
However, a few mentioned that they would use HSBC for larger, longer term investments as they felt it was safe and the overall commission would be small compared to the size of the investment.
Would they invest $71,000USD through the app?
The majority thought that they would be happy to invest $71k USD via the app, though a few would still want to discuss with their Relationship Manager first.
What’s next: Explore education content and market insight opportunities to help customers make an investment choice easier.
Looking for ideas to reduce the reliance on RM, one possible options is to explore using Education content and Market insights to intervene the bond purchasing journey.
Research Round 2: Testing on mobile and collecting knowledge to sharpen customer experience
Prototype for usability testing
Gauge customers' usage, sentiment, pain points and experience when using Bond on mobile, in the onboarding, discovery, purchase and monitoring journey.
We conducted 6x 1on1 interviews 50/50 on gender with a mixture of bond and non-bond investors.
We conducted 6 x 60 minute sessions with existing Jade, and higher purchasing power Premier Account customers, who must have made their investments/executed their trades themselves (as opposed to using a Relationship Manager), with a mixture of those who have and haven’t purchased bonds in the past. The sessions, conducted in Cantonese, consisted of an interview and usability test. The participants are even gender split.
Participants were then asked to conduct a number of tasks to evaluate different aspects of the bond investment journey, from onboarding and discovery, through to purchasing and bond monitoring.
Key findings
Participants want to view key product information only. Any extra information is not necessary.
During the A/B testing on the product list, participants choose the product card with least information option as they preferred to show more products than info. If the users want to view more details, they will visit the product detail page.
No participants start to find the product through search. They view the products through the presets from HSBC.
No participants started from search, half of them use Bond collections, while the others would 'view all'.
None of the participants use the filtering feature inside bond collections. The users saw the categories there are being filtered by HSBC, and felt confident to scroll through the options there.
Not using search might be users find their product through risk rating or coupon rate. We need to have more testing to validate the user behavior.
MVP features
Collections
A curated list of products by category to help customers to speed up discovery process
Product details
It displays the price and all of the related details of the product
Search
Bond search engine, users can find the product by inputting the issuer or the universal product code.
Cost calculator
A tool to help the customer to calculate the total amount they need to pay for the purchase.
Compare
Detail Comparison the products price , yield-to- maturity , coupon rates and other important specs
Users allow to compare up to 5 products
Guided search
Provides a list of relevant results from 3 simple questions to the customer
What's next
Monitor the usage after the launch
To enhance the product, we need to monitor the actual usage to determine what to do next.
Intervene with data
Carry out research for opportunities to leverage HSBC exclusive investment insights into the Bond purchasing journey.
Above is the summary of the project, if you want a in-depth walkthrough, please contact me