Hong Kong: Staying Ahead of the Competition in the Wealth Management Business

Case 2.1 Hong Kong: Staying ahead of the competition in the wealth management business

11. Give some examples of the problem identification research that a leading bank such as HSBC can undertake to ensure competitiveness in the wealth management business.

Although the financial market in Hong Kong is competitive, there are still unmet some customers' needs for HSBC to launch new financial products and services in order to expand its market share. Besides, HSBC also need to fix some problems to ensure competitiveness in the wealth management business, such as:

1. The unmet needs

Based on the respondents, there are 62 percent express concerns over unexpected health care costs after retirement. That means long term medical insurances are the major issue. And 56 percent were worried their income would not keep pace with inflation. To those who concern the inflation problem, they need investment portfolio that can provide revenue higher than the inflation. Only 29 percent had formulated a plan to ensure regular income, so there are 71 percent unmet annuity plan needs that HSBS could penetrate their business.

2. Simplify products

One of the possible reasons that those potential customers still have these unmet needs is these diversified financial or investment products are too complicated to understand. Banks publish new products because of it "product-driven" interests, but HSBC should consider clients' need before providing related products and services.

3. Certified Financial Planner professional qualifications

To solve the previous problems, HSBS used an advanced customer services to combine the clients' needs and its products. In addition, this kind of superior service could be the differentiation between HSBC and other wealth management businesses.

13. You are the research director of HSBC, and you recognize that the management problem is to maintain the company's market leadership position. Define your marketing research problem.

Based on the question 11, I believe the key to maintain HSBC's leadership position is the connection between the clients' loyalty and the CFP service performance.

14. Based on the foregoing marketing research problem, develop two suitable research questions and formulate two hypotheses for each of them.

To evaluate the clients' loyalty and the CFP service performance, we can design a questioner to analyze clients' satisfaction about CFP service performance. Firstly, we can use frontlines employees' background as a subjective variable to evaluate their service performance. And we can use customers' financial investment changes in HSBC as an objective variable to evaluate the clients' loyalty.