HSBC innovates with Microsoft Power Apps to make impressive savings

Global but local

HSBC Commercial Bank is the largest, international commercial bank in the world. It solves problems for its customers across investment banking, markets and trading, trade and payments and lending, operating across more than 50 markets globally.  
 

Acting globally with a local focus requires adaptable, flexible global technology solutions. Richard Lord explains, “We have massive global core technology systems that serve our customers across multiple markets. We also have a need to modify and adapt those systems to the needs of local markets.” 
 

To attain the right balance between global solutions and local adaptation, HSBC looked to the tools of Microsoft Power Platform.  

Choosing Microsoft Power Platform

HSBC Commercial Bank has been using Microsoft Power Platform for over 18 months. David Rice, Global COO at HSBC, explains, “In that time, Microsoft Power Platform has enabled us to innovate – both iteratively and to an order of magnitude that allows us to reimagine our operations, our servicing platforms and our product propositions.”
 

HSBC’s decision to opt for the low-code approach of Microsoft Power Platform has helped to drive new innovation throughout the business. Richard Lord says, “One of the things I’m excited about with Microsoft Power Apps is that, by using a citizen development programme, we take the tooling for innovation out to the hands of the people who know the problems best. That’s creating an opportunity for us to draw on the minds, the intelligence and the experience of thousands of people.” 

Empowering everyone to innovate

Staff have really embraced Power Platform and are realising the potential of citizen-led development in many different ways across the global operations. Wise Gao, Head of Regional Delivery, Wholesale IT – Asia Pacific at HSBC, offers one example: “We have created creative lending solutions in Power Apps to digitalise the lending process for our wholesale business. We were able to deploy the end-to-end solution in Power Platform across eleven markets in 90 days with around a 50 percent cost saving.” 
 

Another example is offered by David Rice. He explains, “A client service analyst in Hong Kong, who was trained on the platform, was able then to release an app that saved our Hong Kong business 117,000 hours in a year,” he says. “It’s such a great example of the power that can be unlocked by this system. It allows us to create Return on Investment that exceeds any of our expectations going into this.”