I turned 30 in June this year.

And I planned absolutely nothing for it.

But my girlfriend being organised as she is, did.

So we went to a nature reserve in the south of England and saw Rhinos:

With every year I depart from my 20s, my desire to celebrate wanes. Call me miserable.

But this year was different. It was all done for me! (and I’m very thankful).

My attitude to my own life events is a bad example in organisation and celebration.

But my girlfriends elite trip and activity planning is a good example.

What does this have to do with banks and outsourcing opportunities?

Large enterprises can learn a thing or 2 from my trip to a U.K. safari..

• Planning

• Timing

• Build up

• Momentum

• Back-up plans

HSBC has just relaunched its offer in the UK, focused on serving more people with lots of cash. Affluent individuals are the target.

And like with any significant life event, HSBC will need to do the right planning, launching, and momentum building activities to achieve its financial goals.

That’s where vendors come in. With any new offering launched by an enterprise, there’s a tonne of opportunities for right fit outsourcing and staffing firms to help out.

But first..

The Source: What we’ll cover today

🦏 What: A deep dive into HSBC’s relaunch of its Premier brand in the UK.

🦏 Who: The key players driving this initiative.

🦏 Where: The focus is on HSBC’s operations within the UK wealth management market.

🦏 Why: The relaunch aims to attract mass-affluent clients, doubling HSBC UK’s wealth assets to £100 billion in 5 years.

🦏 How: It provides a look at opportunities for outsourcing consultants to step in and assist with operational scalability and customer service improvements.

✨TL;DR✨

The boiling point was driven by a few factors..

• Heightened competition in the UK wealth management sector.

• Regulatory challenges prompting banks to differentiate their offerings.

But what next? And how can an outsourcing expert capitalise?

The 5 Step Playbook

to work with banks who have just launched a new offer

1. Who are our target audience?

• Who: HSBC UK and affiliated wealth management teams.

• Decision Makers to Engage:

  • Chief Operating Officers

  • Chief Technology Officers

  • Chief Wealth Officers

  • Chief Marketing Officers

  • Heads of Product

  • Heads of Customer Experience

  • Heads of Innovation / Digital

Goals:

• Doubling wealth assets to £100 billion.

• Expanding the Premier customer base.

• Offering comprehensive 24/7 financial planning and support services.

Their needs? Take your mind back to my birthday. With such a significant event, you may go to a restaurant for a birthday meal. So when a bank launches a new offer, comes a need for..

🍰 The Ingredients [Technology and IT]:

• Financial analysis and reporting

• IT and software development

👩🏻‍🍳 The Chefs [Back & Front office]:

• Data mgmt.

• Transaction processing

• Legal, Compliance and Risk

• Sales wealth mgmt experience

• Wealth mgmt product experience

• Product growth marketing experience

🍽️ Service Staff [Customer support]:

• Multilingual support

• 24/7 availability

2. Why now?

Strategic Shift:

HSBC are actively prioritising the UK market by offering more products to more wealthy people. This is to increase revenue (like every business does).

This event = specific resource and operational muscle is needed…

Unless they already have this surplus in house. How do we know they even want help? Well..

They’re planning. Big time.

🛎️ Hiring Signals:

In the past week, HSBC have posted 502 new job roles on LinkedIn:

• Wealth management engagement roles

• Wealth managers

• Product managers

• Customer service

• Automation

• Analysts

• Ops

• Marketing

These roles are perfect for product, market, and operational expansion.

Local hires will also cost a fair whack, especially with this level of specific expertise needed in wealth management.

It can also take 2-3 months from passing an interview to actually starting in an org as large as this (I was part of one!).

3. Their needs, and your role to play

Sourcing consultants are well positioned to help.

A banks needs:

• Elite customer support systems for affluent clients.

• Central, personalised CX solutions to manage high need clients.

• Financial analysts to manage new inbound.

• Marketing and outreach for client acquisition.

• Product growth marketing for new wealth mgmt products.

Opportunities for Outsourcing folks:

• Wealth Management: Personalized investment and financial planning roles.

• Customer Support: Multilingual and 24/7 availability for basic queries, highly skilled account managers for direct 1:1 servicing to affluent clients.

• Product Management: Wealth Management product specialists who know how to ideate, grow, sell and evolve products.

• Marketing: Product growth marketers who know how to launch and manage big campaigns.

• Technology: CX solutions that cover multiple channels like web chat, voice, email to handle tailored, white glove support needs for new audience.

• Operations: Productive teams that can handle increased volumes as a result of more cash in the bank, and payment / transaction monitoring tasks.

4. What does a dream partnership look like?

You provide specialist consulting type roles, as well as manage some heavily manual and higher volume processes - like operational processing, marketing, and product analytics.

#1: CX Technology Consultants to acquire and retain high ticket clients.

• Focus on omnichannel automated customer support, to cater for varied needs across affluent clients

• Strong escalation process in place for complex queries that need to be handled by a human

• AI solutions that provide personalisation. They help affluent individuals get more out of their assets and cash (think investment forecasting tools and non-liable advice like taking advantage higher interest accounts).

• Tools that help bank account managers instantly respond to affluent clients, as well as proactively service them based on client behaviour

#2: Customer support teams and account managers to reactively and proactive serve.

#2.1: Customer Support Teams:

Think of running marathon (I can’t, never done it). You know your joints and muscles are going to be in PAIN. So what do you do? You prepare and mitigate. To reduce the tidal wave of incoming pain you: stretch, hydrate, eat glucose rich foods, and do practise runs. Customer support teams are a banks marathon prep when there is a new customer base and product launch..

• Exciting CX technology and tools are great, but you need humans to operate, control, and add that emotional touch in service experiences for clients.

• This comes in the form of: helpdesks to manage high volume, repeat queries - as well as look for opportunities to introduce self-service to reduce those queries

• This will require a team of customer support reps who are productive, and can communicate well with internal product teams to make changes to the client facing tools - this is to reduce repetitive queries and save time

• This will need more people on the ground to keep this wave of volume at bay, so the current ops teams are not overwhelmed - causing a ripple effect of bad will with newly acquired clients that need their investment transferred yesterday.

#2.2: Account Managers:

Think of a 5* hotel that comes with a dedicated staff member. They take your food preferences, hand deliver it, take your coats, park your car…

• I know first hand the needs of high value clients.

• Sometimes it genuinely more efficient to automate responding to queries, but affluent clients emotionally want a human to talk to instantly, and for the human to get things right

• They also want an account manager who is their second brain. Someone to think of the future, to include them in new product development conversations, and to proactively engage them - all to give them that premium experience.

#3: Operational teams to handle increased query volumes.

The marathon analogy still applies. You need to prep for the higher volume of pain and steps you’ll take..

• There will be more cash in the banks systems from the new clients.

• This will generate more processing demand: payments, inter account transfers, transaction monitoring, interest calculations, account statement postings.

• This will need more people on the ground to keep this wave of volume at bay, so the current ops teams are not overwhelmed - causing a ripple effect of bad will with newly acquired clients that need their investment transferred yesterday.

#4: Product marketing experts who can make a success of the re launch, and analysts who can make sense of new data.

Let’s go back to my birthday. If I was single, it would’ve been a non event. But it wasn’t. It was great. So a bank like HSBC - who are re launching a premium offer to wealthy clients - needs to have..

• Marketing campaign expertise to build awareness and interest with prospects

• Specific product growth marketing resource to micro launch the suite of products, as well as analyse and see what works / does not work.

• Analysts who work hand in hand, looking at the reams of new operational, service and product data. These folks are INTEGRAL to fine tuning and improving each aspect of the new offer for years to come.

How I’d position myself 

Stand out as more than a vendor by offering:

• Evidence of industry expertise in wealth management. Look at your current team. Who has connections or experience in this world?

• Consultation + talent. You don’t just focus on getting bums in seats; you set them up with the tech + tools required to enhance service and product decisions for the long haul.

• Lower cost, speed and efficiency: in onboarding services vs local hires who take months to on board, and might not be fit for the job.

But banks already have huge talent acquisition and product teams. How do we set apart? With our unique selling points.

These could be:

• Access to talent that have worked on wealth mgmt. projects before

• You help businesses work on high value stuff, by handling 80% of the volume with skilled operators

• Speed of on boarding (weeks vs months)

5. Where to find decision makers

Using the above trust building tips, I:

1. Follow and engage content of people I’d love to work with (genuinely)

2. Create content that solves their pains, and;

3. Reach out to them to understand more about their problems

Role titles I’d recommend to look for in a bank relaunching an offer..

All based in the country of the launch.

• COO: operationally driven, will prioritise making sure op model can handle new customer base. Will be interested in operational staffing.

• CTO / Head of Innovation / Head of Digital: technology driven, will be interested in improving existing (HIGHLY manual) customer support platforms and self-service portals. Will want to diversify the ways customers can contact, and understands importance of personalisation. Will be interested in CX technology offers.

• Head of Product / CMO: wants to smoothly launch a brand new set of products & services to market. Will want to do this quickly, with quality, and have data to inform decisions on product strategy and feature development. Will work closely with marketing (CMO) to prioritise audiences to engage with new products, and will highly value analytical expertise. Will be interested in marketers who specialise in product growth, campaign management & tracking, and business analysts who have experience with making gold out of large, messy data sets.

After conducting a dozen interviews over the past few months, I’ve created a checklist of ways decision makers in banks like to be engaged:

✅ Recommendations from existing banking vendors who can’t fill their need

✅ Gartner reports (or any market report with your firms name in it)

✅ Recommendations from third-party recruitment agencies or industry consultants

✅ Engage genuinely with frequent decision maker posts on LinkedIn

✅ Invite them to a webinar / send a personalised Loom

✅ Attend an event they are at (virtual) and ask a question after

✅ Produce content that educates and solves their pains (in this case, understanding CICC challenges of expanding product lines and their customer base)

✅ Align the talent acquisition strategy with their strategy

All in all.. be their friend and advisor.

Thanks for reading 🙂 

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