Building the bank of the future

HSBC is leveraging MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to build a digital banking platform to power the bank of the future. As one of the largest banking and financial services organizations in the world, HSBC is taking advantage of open banking to drive new, connected experiences for its more than 38 million customers worldwide. With MuleSoft and its Anypoint API Community Manager, HSBC is building APIs that securely unlock access to core banking products to enable collaboration with partners, accelerate innovation and open new revenue channels.

The rise of PSD2 requirements and open banking are requiring financial institutions to share customer data with third-party developers via APIs. Connected customer experiences have become the new battleground. Banks are going through a revolution where they must move from transactions to personalized interactions and digital services for customers. HSBC is leveraging an API strategy to develop a digital platform and co-create new experiences with a broader ecosystem of developers and partners.

“HSBC is driving incredible innovation in the era of open banking through API-led connectivity,” said Dinesh Keswani, group CTO and CIO of retail digital banking, HSBC. “We are moving to serving customers across multiple online and offline channels. With MuleSoft, HSBC has built thousands of APIs in an application network and deployed them across multiple environments to deliver new and consistent experiences. We’ve been able to reduce our app development time by 75% and release new functionality to consumers every two weeks versus once a quarter.”

Building a digital banking platform

HSBC realized that the bank of the future will be a digital platform, powered by a collection of APIs that enable truly connected, multi-channel experiences. The bank chose MuleSoft and its API-led approach to connectivity to develop a shared services platform for secure asset reuse and business self-service. HSBC was able to turn its core banking products, including credit cards, mortgages, and payments, into APIs in an application network that can be easily and quickly assembled to create new experiences. 

For example, HSBC can draw data from legacy systems using APIs to enable new features, such as showing customers an overview of their spending across all their bank accounts.

Building APIs with MuleSoft, HSBC can unlock its backend systems and connect them with trusted third parties to develop a range of other new customer-facing services. By enabling an API ecosystem to innovate on top of its core bank platform, HSBC can drive speed, agility and innovation at scale to deliver more value for its customers.

Tapping into the API economy

In the same way that APIs have accelerated internal innovation, external APIs present the opportunity for HSBC to collaborate with partners and create new revenue channels. In this new API economy, developers are HSBC’s new customers and developer portals are the new customer storefront. To engage and evangelize its APIs to developers, HSBC is leveraging API Community Manager built on Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud to deliver an internal and external developer portal that will span more than 30 markets and three global businesses.

API Community Manager uniquely combines a full-featured API portal and industry-leading digital experience capabilities, transforming how teams collaborate across the entire lifecycle of an API program. With API Community Manager, HSBC can easily build and engage API ecosystems, so it can foster new partnerships to deliver joint business value and innovate faster. For example, HSBC’s Mortgage API could be applied to home buying websites so that consumers can filter houses for which they are pre-approved.

“With MuleSoft supporting our API program, HSBC is leading innovation in a highly competitive developer-driven third-party ecosystem,” said Keswani. “Using Anypoint Platform, we can easily integrate with new internal and external applications and create new digital capabilities that deliver personalized experiences.”