HSBC's Global Online Banking Platform

One of the final designs for a Move Money journey within the HSBC GSP banking application.

Overview:

When HSBC set out to unify its online banking experience for a diverse international customer base, it wasn’t just a design challenge - it was an orchestration effort. Each region had its own regulations, conventions, and deeply ingrained banking behaviours. Building a consistent, intuitive product for such diversity meant balancing usability, compliance, and scale.

As part of the UX team embedded through HSBC’s strategic design partner (HeathWallace / Mirium), I worked closely with product owners, designers, and engineering pods across a highly distributed delivery model.

We operated on a rotating “Bar System” model - where designers would pick up whichever new functionality became available. It mirrored the agility of barristers in a courtroom: fast, responsive, and deeply collaborative. But with that came the need for shared context, strong documentation, and peer alignment. No designer owned any flow alone - and that was the strength of it.

We didn’t just design. We tested, refined, and challenged each other’s work. Usability testing was core to our process, and it wasn’t siloed. I moderated sessions on my colleagues’ flows, and they tested mine - reducing bias and surfacing blind spots we might’ve missed solo. That feedback loop was where our best ideas emerged.

Image from one of the Axure prototypes use for testing functionality.

A few of my specific contributions:

• Led UX for key transactional flows like Pay Multiple Beneficiaries and Credit Card Applications helping shape experiences that translated regulatory requirements into intuitive user journeys across markets.

• Created region-specific flows tailored for complex scenarios (e.g. Jersey’s multi-tiered account structures)

• Conducted moderated usability testing to uncover usability friction and inform design pivots

• Delivered detailed Axure prototypes and annotated specs for distributed engineering teams across time zones

• Took part in accessibility and compliance reviews, ensuring designs met banking standards and FCA guidance

  
  

  

  Example of a simple user flow within the Pay Multiple Beneficiaries journey

What I learned:

Designing at this scale requires more than clean UI - it demands diplomacy, empathy, and a working fluency with constraints. Whether navigating stakeholder expectations or balancing regulatory nuance with usability, my role was often that of translator: turning complexity into clarity.

Screenshot from a specification document for this project, showing an anotated wireframe with associated notes.

Outcome:

We delivered multiple high-priority journeys under tight timelines, enabling HSBC to roll out a consistent banking interface across continents. But more than any individual flow, the real success was embedding a collaborative, research-led design approach that scaled across both teams and territories.