Opening up a world of opportunity.

HSBC underwent a major business and strategic transformation in 2021, including a new brand purpose, promise, and values. HSBC also needed to re-establish the power of our brand, focusing on a newly identified and highly valuable core audience. An audience that connects with our own internationalist mindset and chooses to engage with brands that have purpose.

Shaped by 18,000 colleagues, our purpose, “Opening up a world of opportunity,” was born. This unifying idea lives through absolutely everything we do, both internally and externally. Our brand is now underpinned by shared values and a clear purpose that inspires the experiences our customers and colleagues expect. For the first time, our corporate purpose and customer promise are one and the same.

To express our purpose and promise, we’ve designed a brand world that opens up through imagery, motion, and animation. A world where HSBC is cinematic and expansive. Where its key distinctive assets become the canvas for those experiences and are delivered through our range of global services and channels, including +60 markets, 3 business lines. An extraordinary range of channels and touchpoints that enables almost 10% of global trade is no small feat.

Create is HSBC’s design system and platform. It was designed around the needs of our users, to serve the needs of their customers. Create is a modular system that grows and adapts to our customer needs with contributions from our creative community.

It’s been crafted with a clear purpose, to be “the beating heart of HSBC’s brand”. A heart that pushes out the most comprehensive and user-friendly guidelines, assets, toolkits, and approaches. It also unites creative teams and pulls in the very best from across the Group – from airports to apps, billionaires to homeless people, and made-at-home businesses to multinationals.

Create’s mission is to simplify, inspire, and accelerate every HSBC customer experience. This required setting a very high bar that the entire Group would strive for. We had to ensure we fulfil our promise of “opening up a world of opportunity” for every customer and colleague, whatever their abilities.

At HSBC we make every digital experience accessible-by-design, including leading digital accessibility standards, cloud-based design toolkits, component libraries, asset libraries, support, and user testing by a panel of 70 disabled users.

By ensuring that our brand is accessible, we enable people with disabilities to find their opportunity.