In 2015, faced with another serious blow to their reputation due to the Swiss Leaks scandal, HSBC recognised an urgent business need to restore staff morale and address the negative media coverage. With the reputation of banks at an all-time low (according to the Edelman Trust Barometer) and with HSBC mired in scandal, the business needed to restore staff pride and reassure employees that their personal values were also the values of HSBC. Staff morale was the primary concern, but the bank also recognised that the views of employees, shared on social media, can have a powerful effect (positive or negative) on a brand’s public reputation. They decided to launch a values campaign, based around a 10 minute documentary – the bank’s first ever employee-led filming project. HSBC is a fairly conservative organisation operating in a highly regulated sector. The campaign involved considerable challenges – technical, legal, cultural and creative.

Since the creation and sharing of UGC was central to the campaign, HSBC researched the market to identify a scalable and customisable technical solution that would meet the demanding requirements of a heavily regulated organisation. They found a London based start-up who were in the early stages of developing a video crowd-sourcing app which it seemed feasible to adapt for the bank's purposes. They create a bespoke version of the crowd sourcing app, with unique functionalities for HSBC. In order to give all staff the opportunity to share footage, they created the app in 6 different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Traditional and Simplified Chinese and French) and made it fully accessible in line with the Disability Discrimination Act. To comply with strict regulatory guidelines the app also enabled contributors to digitally sign legal release forms.