About
Fraud and cybercrime costs the Global economy $trillions a year. As a bank, we understand how easy it to fall victim to fraud. We wanted to remove this stress and financial impact on businesses and individuals by helping them protect themselves against fraud, with quick and simple upskilling in this area. As a result, we have created the HSBC Fraud and Cyber Awareness App.
Innovation presentation
Fraud and cybercrime costs the Global economy $trillions a year. As a bank, we understand how easy it to fall victim to fraud. We wanted to remove this stress and financial impact on businesses and individuals by helping them protect themselves against fraud, with quick and simple upskilling in this area. As a result, we have created the HSBC Fraud and Cyber Awareness App.
The HSBC Fraud and Cyber Awareness app is a free educational app made to keep businesses and individuals up to date with the latest fraud trends, scams and cyberattacks. With the collaboration of our customers, fraud experts and design team, we have created an informative, concise and user friendly app. By centralising information, guidance and actions to take around fraud and cyber security, we aim to help individuals protect their businesses from these issues.
There are five main features within the app:
- Guides: to help users quickly understand the differences between fraud terminology, with easy to read descriptions.
- Articles: to keep users stay informed on the go, with easy to read content, including advice cards providing guidance on the dos and don’ts around fraud and cybercrime
- Videos: engaging video content explaining fraud trends and scams
- Alerts: delivery of notifications to your phone, as and when details of fraud trends emerge.
- Quizzes – users can test and embed their learning
Story behind the project:
HSBC UK observed the need for increased Fraud and Cyber awareness and an idea for a free mobile app was developed, to provide educational material (articles, guides and videos) real-time alerts sharing the latest fraud trends, scams and cyber-attacks to help increase resilience against common threats.
The app was subsequently approved to be taken forward and following a pilot with 200 customers, the app went live in May 2021, won 3 industry awards, and based on testimonials has prevented £100k's in fraud.
An important decision to make the app available for all (whether a customer or not), completely free of charge, to help protect the wider community, which was noted by UK Regulators.
Following the successful launch for UK businesses, a decision was made to expand the content of the app to cover issues pertinent to UK retail customers.
The app was also developed to be made available in 8 Middle East and North African countries within the MENAT region.
The project team purposefully orchestrated the development phase to complete the expansion of the app to MENAT and UK Retail at the same time, to benefit as many users as possible in the shortest time period with significant internal collaboration cross departmental teams. On the 22nd July 2022 the app went live to a UK Retail audience, and on the 5th August 2022 it went live to all 8 MENAT countries. This expansion has exponentially increased the size of the audience (now has c.25k downloads). The latest development round also includes some exciting new interactive features including quizzes, sharing of content with others, user feedback on content and much more; which will help to reinforce key fraud and cyber messages; further enhancing the user’s resilience.
The deployment of the app is testament to the hard work of the cross functional and regional team, including: Global Cybersecurity, MENAT Cybersecurity, UK Commercial Banking Fraud and UK Retail Digital Fraud.
Uniqueness of the project
HSBC is the first major bank to create an app of this kind – free, specialised in fraud and cyber security, and available for all (not just HSBC customers) based in the UK, UAE, Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Turkey, completely free of charge.
It is also the first HSBC app to be available for both personal and business customers, which has paved the way for increased collaboration between the retail and commercial arms of the bank.
Strong interest and admiration for the app has been shown by regulators, central banks and competitors both in the UK and internationally.
To spread increased awareness around fraud and cyber threats with customers and non HSBC customers, to help protect everyone in the community.
To also send real-time notifications to users to keep them up-to-date with the latest scams trending at the time.
To announce the launch, a press release was issued to personal finance journalists, which generated significant media coverage, including on the Press Association and The Independent and the Liverpool Echo.
