Global Originations Redesign for HSBC — Result: 8.6× Increase in Digital Onboarding Conversion
Role: Senior UX Originations and Design system
Team: Full cross-functional Team (UX Designer, UI Designer, Data Scientist, Full-stack engineers, QA) part of the first cross-functional team, then scaled the delivery programme to several teams consisting of over 150 people in 6 offices globally.
The Challenge
HSBC serves over 40 million customers in 65+ countries. Their retail onboarding journey was slow, fragmented, and heavily reliant on branches and manual back-office work. Legacy systems, siloed teams, and rigid ways of working made it hard to improve functionality or deliver at speed.
My Contribution
As Senior UX Lead, I shaped the user experience for global originations and helped lay the foundation for the design system used across teams. I worked closely with designers, engineers, and product leads to translate complex onboarding requirements into clearer, faster, customer-centered journeys. I also helped scale the delivery from one team into a multi-team programme with shared standards and governance. I helped bring the customer voice into a highly complex global programme, shaped the end-to-end user journey, and ensured the design system enabled delivery at scale. By connecting design, engineering, and programme leadership, I contributed to making onboarding dramatically faster and simpler for millions of customers worldwide.
From Insight to Scaled Delivery
We started with deep user research to understand where customers were dropping off and what prevented them from completing the journey. Three core issues stood out:
Required branch visits
Heavy back-office data entry
Long approval and processing times
We redesigned the journeys to eliminate unnecessary steps, introduced digital checks, and created a design system that enabled fast, consistent delivery across regions. We also set up ongoing user testing and analytics across live products, so each team could learn and improve continuously.
On the technology side, the teams built a modern cloud platform, enabling automated provisioning and rapid deployment. Clear team structures, roles, and a unified roadmap approach ensured everyone remained focused on delivering customer value.
Impact
The results were transformative for HSBC’s onboarding performance and operational efficiency:
8.6× increase in onboarding conversion (from 5% to 43%)
Approval times reduced from 3–6 days to 5 seconds
Deployment cycle reduced from 6 months to multiple releases per day
Up to 50% faster delivery of complex onboarding flows thanks to the code-based design system
A scalable design system with strong governance, enabling global teams to deliver consistently and safely
