“Well, that’s better!”
- CFO Corporate Banking - HSBC
HSBC Corporate Banking — Secure Host-to-Host Onboarding
HSBC Connect Host-to-Host is a solution tailored for large and multinational corporations and organisations with complex banking and treasury needs. It enables direct, secure, and automated communication between a company’s systems (such as ERP, treasury management systems, or accounting platforms) and HSBC. This service is commonly used by corporations that handle high volumes of financial transactions or require streamlined treasury operations.
TL;DR
The Problem
Corporate Host-to-Host onboarding could take up to 12 months.
The work depended on too many people, too many handoffs and too much manual communication between client teams, banking partners and HSBC internal teams.
How do we improve this?
I mapped the workflow end to end, identified the points where people were waiting, chasing or guessing, and redesigned the experience around clearer task ownership, progress visibility, documentation, configuration and testing.
The outcome
The redesigned onboarding model reduced the process from months to hours in optimal conditions — a 4,380x improvement — while giving clients and internal teams a clearer view of progress, ownership and next actions.
4,380 times faster.Woooooooooooooosh!
The problem and where to begin
HSBC was receiving negative feedback from large corporate clients about the time and effort involved in completing Connect Host-to-Host onboarding.
The C-suite wanted it treated as a priority because the process was starting to create reputational risk. Clients were asking why something so important still felt slow, manual and difficult to understand.
The issue was not that people were doing a bad job. The issue was that the service had grown around manual coordination: emails, documents, calls, technical checks, client-side dependencies, bank-side approvals and unclear ownership.
That made the process hard to manage and easy to delay. In some cases, onboarding took up to 12 months.
Understand it.
Before designing anything, I needed to understand how the service actually worked.
That meant mapping the people, systems and dependencies behind the interface: corporate finance teams, IT teams, implementation managers, banking partners, HSBC internal teams, documentation, security requirements, connection setup, testing and go-live.
This work made the hidden complexity visible.
It showed where clients were losing confidence, where internal teams were carrying unnecessary coordination work, and where the product needed to give people a clearer sense of state, ownership and progress.
Simplifying the Workflow
The existing process relied too heavily on people chasing each other manually.
I redesigned the experience around a clearer sequence: documentation, connection setup, configuration, testing and go-live. Each step needed to show what had been completed, what was still outstanding, who needed to act and what would happen next.
The aim was simple: reduce ambiguity.
Clients should not need to ask where they are in the process. HSBC teams should not need to reconstruct progress from emails, calls and documents. The product needed to make the state of the work visible.
Reducing Dependency on Manual Coordination
A major source of delay was the dependency on manual coordination.
Critical actions were being driven by email, availability, follow-up calls, internal checks and client-side task completion. If one person missed an action or misunderstood what was needed, the process could stall.
The redesigned model shifted more of that coordination into the product experience.
Clients and internal teams could see the current state of onboarding, understand which tasks were complete, and identify the next action required.
That made the process easier to move forward without every step needing to be manually chased.
What if?
The design direction was a guided onboarding workflow for corporate clients and HSBC implementation teams.
Instead of treating onboarding as a loose collection of documents, calls and technical handoffs, the experience structured it into clear steps, task ownership, status visibility, documentation, secure communication, configuration and testing.
At any point in the journey, users needed to understand four things:
What has been completed
What still needs to happen
Who needs to act next
Whether the process is ready to move forward
That became the organising logic for the experience.
Guided Task Flow and Stakeholder Notifications
The proposed experience used task prompts and notifications to guide people through the onboarding process.
Each stage surfaced the right action at the right time: documentation, connection setup, configuration, testing and go-live readiness.
This reduced the dependency on email-led coordination and made it clearer when a client, bank-side stakeholder or technical team needed to act.
The important shift was not just making the interface cleaner. It was making the work easier to understand and harder to lose track of.
Outcome
After security testing, compliance validation and real-world implementation, the redesigned onboarding model showed a major improvement.
A process that had traditionally taken up to 12 months could, in optimal conditions, be completed within hours.
That is a 4,380x improvement*.
The work helped turn Host-to-Host onboarding from a fragmented, manually coordinated process into a clearer guided experience with better progress visibility, clearer ownership and a more scalable operating model.
*Or from 365 days to a few hours; though 4,380 times faster sounds amazing doesn’t it!