An HSBC bank is pictured during the coronavirus disease pandemic in the Manhattan borough of New York City on Oct. 19, 2020. The bank reported to revamp its business model Tuesday.Carlo Allegri/Reuters
HSBC Holdings PLC on Tuesday signalled it would embark on a pandemic-induced overhaul of its business model, seeking to flip its main source of income from interest rate to fee-based businesses.
Reporting a 35-per-cent tumble in quarterly profit, Europe’s largest bank also accelerated plans to shrink in size, targeted deeper cost cuts and said it will resume conservative dividend payments when able.
The planned business-model changes mark one of the biggest shifts in strategy to date from HSBC, which has long touted its ability to generate interest income from its more than US$1.5-trillion in customer deposits.
But with interest rates worldwide now rock bottom and even turning negative, the bank is struggling to charge more for loans to borrowers than it pays out to depositors and it warned that net interest income would remain under pressure.
In a potentially seismic shift for the banking industry, HSBC also said it could start charging for products such as standard current accounts that customers in some markets such as Britain expect to be free.
“We will have to look at charging for basic banking services in some markets, because a large number of our customers in this environment will be losing us money,” chief financial officer Ewen Stevenson said.
That could prove a tough pill to swallow in some markets, industry experts said.
“It will need to be done carefully to not damage the trust of the brand or get customers to switch, especially in countries where competitors offer the service for no charge,” said Sudeepto Mukherjee, senior vice-president, financial services, at consulting firm Publicis Sapient.
The restructuring measures helped HSBC shares climb more than 6 per cnet, although they have still lost nearly half their value year to date.
Underscoring its challenges, the bank’s third-quarter revenue fell to US$11.9-billion, down 11 per cent from a year earlier.
Its 35-per-cent slide in pretax profit to US$3.1-billion beat a consensus estimate of US$2.07-billion as HSBC flagged an easing in bad loan provisions.
“While the outlook for impairments still remains highly uncertain … HSBC delivered strong third-quarter results in overall terms and the upbeat outlook commentary in terms of strategy execution is reassuring,” analyst John Cronin at Dublin-based broker Goodbody said.
HSBC now expects losses from bad loans to be at the lower end of the US$8-billion to US$13-billion range it set out earlier this year.
“There are encouraging signs that the credit assumptions we have got are holding up, the government support we are seeing for the corporate sector has bought them time,” Mr. Stevenson told investors on a conference call.
RESTRUCTURING REVVED UP
Faced with fewer options to bolster revenue growth, Asia-focused HSBC has been looking to reduce costs globally and in June resumed plans to cut around 35,000 jobs it had put on ice after the coronavirus outbreak.
The bank has no immediate plans to cut more jobs, Mr. Stevenson said, but that could happen as its transformation plans continue.
HSBC said on Tuesday it plans to reduce annual costs to below US$31-billion by 2022, a more ambitious target than it set out in February and well below the operating expenses of US$42.3-billion it reported in 2019.
It will also accelerate the transformation of its U.S. business, where it has long struggled to compete with much larger players, and will provide an update at its 2020 results in February.
HSBC, which in common with other British lenders stopped paying dividends earlier this year at the request of regulators, said it would communicate a revised dividend policy in February.
Analysts and investors fear the lender could cut payouts in the long run.
“When we start paying distributions again, we’ll start conservatively and build from there,” Mr. Stevenson said on the conference call.
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