HSBC is Leading The Way in Financial Services Enablement
Financial services firms operate in an increasingly complex environment. From banking and wealth management to insurance, competition is fierce, regulatory scrutiny is tightening, and client expectations have never been higher. Yet, despite these pressures, a significant opportunity exists—firms that modernise how they manage content, train and coach their teams, and engage clients can drive meaningful growth and differentiation.
Several years ago, HSBC recognised these challenges and took decisive action—redesigning how they govern and optimise content, guide client-facing teams with insights and best practices, and equip them with the tools to engage buyers effectively. In this conversation that still proves valuable today, James Bickerton, Global Head of Client Development at HSBC, shares the key steps they took, the challenges they overcame, and the technologies that set their team up for success.
Today, modern enablement is more critical than ever. With AI transforming financial services, compliance requirements evolving, and client engagement shifting to digital-first interactions, firms need to evolve. If your organisation is facing similar challenges, HSBC’s experience offers valuable insights on how enablement can drive efficiency, improve client interactions, and fuel long-term growth.
Robert Wahbe: Take me back to the early stages of your transformation strategy. How did it begin?
James Bickerton: In 2020, HSBC announced strategic plans around specific market sectors and products we wanted to compete in. At the same time, we evaluated our customer coverage model. The challenge we faced was making sure the coverage model was set up appropriately post-restructuring to generate capacity and facilitate growth through scale. At the time, we decided to make a substantial investment in how we support our clients while strengthening our policies and process around content.
We wanted to ensure the strategy we were pushing forward for Global Banking was fully aligned with HSBC’s overarching digital strategy rather than move on an independent path. We also wanted to use this opportunity to plug some gaps in our technology suite. Being data-driven in our decision-making, as well as maximising intellectual capital through idea sharing, were key goals for us.
The good news is we’ve got fantastic bankers with deep expertise and many decades of experience supporting their clients. Our efforts were focused on enabling them, through technology and digital tools, to move faster and smarter.
Robert Wahbe: That sounds like a well-grounded strategy. How did the digital initiative come into play, and how did you decide on Highspot?
James Bickerton: We began by interviewing 70 of our largest clients in 2021. They noted the exceptional quality of our people, but also validated that the HSBC operating model wasn’t set up to help our teams serve our clients with ease. We also learned we did not put all the necessary information the bankers needed at their fingertips.
We also interviewed close to 500 bankers across the globe. We learned we have high-quality, fantastic teams, but they have to stretch to find what they need. Sometimes it’s luck, or being in the right place at the right time, that lets them find a highly successful case study launched a few months ago or a new idea to share with their clients. Another missing link was a tool to provide us with deep analytics on our clients’ transactions and related behaviour. So we chose to invest heavily in a new analytics suite and in an enablement and content management platform.
We chose Highspot because we wanted a sales enablement platform that was highly flexible and able to integrate with our CRM. We also liked that Highspot had smart tools and processes to govern content. Finally, we needed a future-proof platform that could scale with us.
Robert Wahbe: You mentioned the integration of Highspot with your CRM, can you elaborate?
James Bickerton: This was crucial. Today, we have 10,000 enablement tool users across roughly 44 markets, so this was a large-scale deployment. Kudos to your team for doing it in the space of six months. With such a large deployment you can’t just bolt something on the side; it has to be embedded into the team’s usual workflows. So we made sure the Highspot enablement platform feels, looks, and operates as part of our overall CRM platform. We’ve been working tirelessly to make sure Highspot is integrated not only with the bankers’ day-to-day processes but also with CRM pipeline activity. We wanted enablement to be part and parcel of our CRM as it was important to have a truly seamless experience for our client-facing teams. The other side, especially being in a highly regulated industry, is having strong governance capabilities as teams publish and share content.
Robert Wahbe: Tell me more about that. What governance controls did you put in place to support a compliant environment?
James Bickerton: Managing and controlling risk is critically important in financial services, and we did not want to remove any risk management when deploying the new enablement capabilities. A big shout out to your team at Highspot for moving mountains in the space of a few months to make sure we could get those necessary control reviews and the right implementation. It involves everything from how we deal with cybersecurity to customer-managed encryption keys to content approval flows that allow for multiple layers of checks and balances in approvals. Finally, for regulatory reasons, we needed to ensure we could administer the platform so that specific content is only accessible by certain bankers and only reaches specific customer segments.
Robert Wahbe: Where are you now on the journey? I know it’s still early but talk to me about the trends you are seeing.
James Bickerton: We are seeing very positive trends already even though we just went live a few months ago. We’re seeing huge engagement and activity. Banker feedback has been very positive and our leadership is saying this is something we should have had all along. Now we need to lean in and make it work for the business. It’s really about bringing the content in at this juncture and less about the technology. We are building a community that’s starting to come to life, and I think that’s the key to unlock. We want to bring everyone on the platform, which will just build upon that continuous community aspect and foster the ability for bankers to learn from each other.
Robert Wahbe: As we wrap up, what are some key lessons learned?
James Bickerton: Bringing the business along the journey is a cliche, but this was by far the most important factor in our transformation. We brought in our bankers from the start and engaged our executives and other teams in the design and deployment. We purposely introduced a multi-dimensional approach to the engagement and took our stakeholders through the big principles to help them understand the larger choices we made, including partnerships like Highspot. Given the complex structure of our global organisation, we had to be highly deliberate about engaging stakeholders in the journey.
We were also very agile from the start, which helped us go from a standing start to live in just under six months. We weren’t running this as a gigantic single engine, but instead had lots of small pods, which helped us stay nimble. In retrospect, what we could have done earlier is make sure the pods were talking to each other more, thinking about interdependencies, and communicating openly around what they were working on to share the impact of their efforts.
What we need to do now is spend more time talking about content management as we move past the technology. We need to change the narrative now to the content and we are very fortunate to have fantastic content producers. It’s important to begin the design work around the content strategy and architecture as early as possible to influence the platform setup from the get go.
Our partnership with Highspot has been fantastic. To drive success with an initiative like this on a global scale, you need to ensure your technology partners fully understand your vision, challenges, and needs. Ultimately, you need a partner that can deliver on aggressive timelines and be able to scale with you.
Highspot is excited to partner with HSBC to continue supporting their digital transformation.
For more information, visit our Financial Services page.
