HSBC is a globally recognised and trusted brand. Its international image has been built over decades, through campaigns that cemented HSBC’s position as “the world’s local bank”. But the brand’s international image is a double-edged sword.

While HSBC is a well-known global brand, HSBC UK competes with local high street retail banks. Its global scale and international credentials have and that it that doesn’t really care about the UK community.

The brief was clear: we needed to localise and humanise the brand by bringing its global purpose “opening up a world of opportunity” to life, in a way that makes a big difference in British lives today.

Without an address, the homeless find themselves in a lose-lose situation where not having a home makes it harder to open a bank account. This makes it harder to secure a legitimate job or claim benefits.

It’s a vicious circle.

To break this vicious circle HSBC UK partnered with Shelter and other homelessness charities to create the first No Fixed Address (NFA) service. A solution that gives people who are homeless bank accounts, using the charities’ address as proof of identification.

The service started as a trial in one branch in 2019, but by the beginning of 2021, with the Brexit effect and the COVID-19 pandemic increasing the economic hardship felt by the homeless community, HSBC UK felt compelled to launch an integrated campaign called “Vicious Circle” to tackle this inadvertent flaw in the financial system, at a national level.

Research revealed that while Britons understand the magnitude of the homelessness issue, they underestimate how difficult it is to break out of the cycle of homelessness. And they don’t realise that financial exclusion plays an exacerbating role in the homelessness cycle.

This led to a breakthrough creative insight: Becoming homeless is hard enough, but not having a bank account makes it even tougher as the way in which society’s financial system has been designed means that once you’ve fallen out of it it’s incredibly hard to find your way back in.

If we were going to make a big difference in the community, we needed to make the relationship between homelessness and financial exclusion clear. So, we launched an integrated campaign that dramatised the revolving nightmare of homelessness and financial exclusion, and offered the community a solution to take the first step in breaking the cycle.

It was designed to have long-term impact, rectifying a previously unknown flaw in the financial system. The service started in 2019 as a trial in 1 branch, it’s now in 144 across the country and will be implemented in every branch. When the latest campaign went live in June 2021, 140 new charities had been onboarded, this has since increased to 204. The groundwork is set for other banks to follow.

The impact was achieved on a national level and exceeded our initial objectives. The service was initially a trial to allow HSBC UK’s Financial Inclusion and Vulnerability team to work out the logistics, train staff, and test if there were any loopholes fraudsters could use. HSBC’s staff galvanised behind the idea, and it is now in 144 branches across the UK, with plans to expand into all of them.