HSBC is putting customers “absolutely at the heart” of what the business does, as the bank undergoes internal changes to build “brilliant customer experiences”.  

It makes sense then that Becky Moffat, who has held the chief marketing officer job title at HSBC UK since 2021, was promoted last month to chief customer officer for wealth and personal banking – while also retaining her CMO role.  

“You have to be able to understand what customers need,” explains Moffat on the logic behind the change.  

“You have to be able to build experiences end to end that are data driven, but also have some emotional intelligence in them and that then you can actually execute on.” 

HSBC’s Becky Moffat promoted to chief customer officer

Her enhanced role reflects HSBC’s desire to bring together all the pieces that build the customer experience. The bank wants to better hold itself “to account” in terms of how it’s delivering what customers “need and want”, as opposed to things sometimes being disparate.

“You end up doing something a little bit different and something else a little bit different, and when it hits customers it might not make sense,” explains Moffat.  

“The whole idea of this is to bring it together so we can make sure that we have customers right at the heart and make sure that we’re always making sense to customers. So that’s the ambition. It’s a journey, but that’s the ambition.”

Broadest church

The CMO role has been subject to many changes in recent years, with businesses opting to replace marketing with consumer, growth, or in HSBC’s case, customer. However, her new position represents the whole spectrum of marketing, argues Moffat.

“Chief customer officer is actually, to me, the broadest church of marketing,” she says. 

“Because marketing is about: who are you for? Why do you want them? What are you delivering to them? And how are you delivering? How do you talk? How do you make people aware of the promotional offer that you’ve got? And how do you price that?”  

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The CMO job has “become very advertising centric”, Moffat adds.

“I’ve moved from being quite advertising centric with a lot of effectiveness work within that and digital marketing activity, and insight and data, into adding in customer segments, customer experience, P&L and then, most latterly, data and analytics,” she explains.

Her promotion also marks a return to some of the work Moffat undertook when she first joined HSBC in 2016, as head of retail banking propositions and current accounts with responsibility for the P&L.  

Rapid evolution

HSBC’s UK marketing team has evolved as the business repositions with its customer-focus, the most significant evolution since Moffat took on the CMO role in 2021 when the team underwent big changes.  

Overall, she describes HSBC as putting “marketing in context”. It’s a necessary change, as the marketing team in terms of scale is “probably three to four times bigger” than it was in 2021 – “because of the wider remit”.  

Moffat is creating “communities of practice” across the marketing function. One being insight, data and analytics.

“[I asked[ How do we build that together to make the most of it? What are the common skills? Where have we got gaps? Where have we got capabilities that we can build on?” she explains.   

Additionally, there’s advertising and marketing, advertising partnerships, strategic marketing – which looks at marketing’s role in driving commercial performance and deep relationships within the business – customer segments and P&L, and experience design and delivery.  

It’s really recalibrating what we do and how we do it to centre on customers – it’s not necessarily completely different to what we were doing, but it’s how we’re bringing it together.

Becky Moffat, HSBC

The latter is focused on everything from how HSBC designs customer experiences to managing the experience whether on the bank’s website or through one-to-one communication. In creating communities of practice and expertise within her team, Moffat also wants to keep it “simple”.  

It’s not a sweeping transformation, but a “rapid evolution” of the team, its structure, capability and skills.  

“It’s really recalibrating what we do and how we do it to centre on customers – it’s not necessarily completely different to what we were doing, but it’s how we’re bringing it together,” she says.

The business wants to be “single minded right from the outset” on the work it puts out being right for its customer proposition.  

In terms of how the team differs from 2021 to today, Moffat explains HSBC is trying to “connect marketing” right the way through the organisation, rather than it being marketing as a “separate team”.  

Moffat believes marketers should be “motivated to connect things” when it comes to important skills.  

“It’s absolutely critical to be able to connect things together, particularly in a large organisation,” she says. “Otherwise, you can end up leaving that to customers and it’s very difficult for them to connect and make sense.”  

According to Moffat, curiosity and the desire to connect things are the “hardest” soft skills to attain.