HSBC picks MuleSoft’s open-banking solutions as banks worldwide rush to modernize themselves

November 22, 2019

Big lender HSBC has taken another step towards re-imagining its offering for the 21^st century by leveraging MuleSoft’s application-building platform.

The new partnership will see HSBC use the Anypoint Platform to build a digital banking platform with APIs that create better solutions for customers.

Thanks to the partnership with the Salesforce company, HSBC has been able to turn core banking products – like credit cards, mortgages and payments – into APIs in an application network.

Among other things, this has meant HSBC has been able to create new features by being able to draw data from legacy systems. The new API-enabled features include showing customers an overview of their spending across all their bank accounts.

Moreover, the partnership will also enable the company to live up to the open banking requirements of the EU’s Revised Payment Service Directive (PSD2). Those rules stipulate that financial institutions must share customer data with third-party developers via APIs.

“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 at 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.”

In October, the news broke that the bank was expected to make 10,000 staff members redundant as part of a massive cut-cutting exercise.

HSBC is not the only incumbent in the process of modernizing its offerings. Several other traditional banks have also responded to the pressure of dealing with the advent of digitally-savvy customers, online challenger banks and increased regulations to bring their businesses into the 21^st century.

For instance, Deutsche Bank has faced two abysmal quarters this year as it is putting more money into restructuring the company. Among other things, this has meant sacking 18,000 employees and replacing them with robots that have so far automated 680,000 hours of manual work.

Similarly, Commerzbank revealed in September that it was planning to close 200 branches and to fire 4,300 workers as it was struggling with falling revenues. Like HSBC, it also said that it was looking to modernize the bank through significant technology investments.

And just this week, Barclays unveiled its new finger vein scanner developed by Hitachi to battle fraud.