With only three guiding pillars and an extremely passionate team behind them, here's what HSBC's entry into the metaverse will look like and how they plan to stay ahead of the Web3 curve
When HSBC announced that it would be the first global financial service provider to enter the Sandbox metaverse, it’s safe to say that the world had many questions.
For one, what would a plot of virtual land occupied by a bank look like? How would it change the banking landscape? While the public was asking these questions—so was HSBC itself, apparently.
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“We don’t know what the end product is. The metaverse is not geographical. There are no laws of physics. We know what experience we want to give our consumers but there is so much potential that we have no idea what the end product could look like,” Suresh Balaji, the Regional Head of Marketing at HSBC Asia Pacific, said with a laugh.
While his answer took me by surprise, I couldn’t deny that his honesty was refreshing. After all, do any of us really know what the future of life in the metaverse really looks like?
Yet, the brand has boldly announced that will not just be partnering with The Sandbox to create opportunities for virtual communities across the world but that it will also be launching a fund to capture investment opportunities in the metaverse for some of its richest clients in Singapore and Hong Kong.
“HSBC has always been passionate about creating brand experiences. So when we began to learn about the metaverse, we started thinking that this could be a great opportunity for us to further engage with people even though many of us were still learning,” Suresh said.
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“I personally started learning about Web3 (a term that encapsulates everything from cryptocurrencies to the metaverse) because it simply sounded really interesting. I was reading about the metaverse late into the night, trying to understand it all. I felt like a kid in a comic store when it came to Web3, honestly,” Suresh said before adding that he knew that it was going to be the start of something very big.
“Over the pandemic, gaming rose exponentially. People love gamified experiences and more experiences are going to be gamified in the years to come so we need to adapt,” he said.
As Suresh continued to learn about the metaverse, he noticed that there were a number of colleagues around him who were similarly getting excited about the possibilities of Web3.
This was how a team was formed within HSBC with interested team members to explore how they could push its boundaries with HSBC.
“The team is basically made up of members from all over the company who share an interest in Web3. We meet weekly and slowly we started building up this idea to put HSBC in the metaverse,” Suresh shared. “Fact is when the social media wave hit, we were late to the game. Not this time though. This time we are learning on the go and we want to be ahead of the curve.”
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