HSBC is testing standalone investment advice, where the bank will give advice on investments only without considering the customers’ wider financial situation.
Caroline Connellan, head of UK Wealth at HSBC Bank, said at the moment the bank offers holistic financial planning covering all different aspects of advice.
She said one of the things customers have said they want is independent conversations on protection and investment.
As such, the bank launched standalone protection advice in October last year where advisers can offer advice to a customer on protection only without having a broader conversation.
“We have been testing some work around standalone investment advice where customers can come and have a conversation with us and we can given them advice on investments only without considering their wider situation or investments that they hold either with us or elsewhere,” Ms Connellan explained.
“We are seeing very strong customer demand and we are seeing that across the different levels of investments, at low levels as well as high levels.
“It (the advice) is not specific to low levels and what we are looking to do is make that available to more customers later on this year once we have concluded the testing.”
Ms Connellan added the bank would be talking about this more in a couple of months time, but could not be time specific at this stage about when a limited investment advice service would launch due to the rigourous nature of the testing.
Elsewhere, the bank is looking to expand its specialist retirement advice service.
Ms Connellan said that over the course of this year, the bank has offered a number of its customers specialist retirement advice, which supports customers to make choices for retirement using pensions freedoms but also considers some of the income choices they have at retirmement or post retirement.
She said HSBC has focused initially where it has seen the highest demand, which is where customers have the highest amount of investable assets.
As at the end of last year, the bank stated it had 70 out of roughly 700 advisers who were qualified and franchised to give that level of high net-worth advice.
“What we are doing now is we are seeing throughout the course of this year how we can make this specialist retirement advice available to more of our customers because regardless of level of investable assets these are very important decisions that customers have to make.”
HSBC does not have a set number of advisers in line for the expansion since it will be driven by customer demand.
Ms Connellan added this particular area - advising on consolidation and how to take income in retirement - is best fulfilled through face to face advice.
However in the accumulation stage, in her view, there are opportunities for customers to make decisions for themselves by offering them the right information.
She said the bank currently has no plans to branch out into robo-advice.
“In terms of our offering we don’t have any plans to go into robo-advice per se... but we are watching the robo-advice space eagerly because we do believe there will be changes and it is something we may look to explore going forward. We don’t have any definite plan at this moment in time.”
ruth.gillbe@ft.com
