Goose fails to lay Golden Week egg
Bank promotions procure little from National Day visitors
Hong Kong's retail banks received a lukewarm response to their week-long courtship of mainland tourists during 'Golden Week', with some visitors making inquiries about services offered but few opening bank accounts.
Local banks such as HSBC, Standard Chartered and Bank of East Asia (BEA) extended their branch opening hours during the week-long National Day holiday to lure mainland tourists and convince them to open accounts, convert yuan or even buy investment funds.
Some banks also handed out coupons and broadcast short messaging service messages to tempt mainland visitors into their branches.
The response so far has been half-hearted but bankers are still hailing their efforts to win the hearts of mainland customers as a success.
'When we decided to extend banking hours, we never expected a very high account opening rate. We just wanted to get more customers to know DBS in Hong Kong is one of the banks ready to serve them,' DBS managing director and head of consumer banking Sunny Cheung Yiu-tong said.
'In that, I will say that our bank has been successful.'
Standard Chartered's head of branches Catherina Chan said the bank saw a 'double-digit' rise in inquiries for opening bank and credit-card accounts but admitted that actual account openings were 'not a huge number'.
BEA general manager and head of personal banking Tong Hon-shing said: 'I haven't looked at the numbers yet but my feeling is that not many mainland Chinese visitors came to our branches.'
At the very least, Hong Kong's lenders see a new source of revenue in the stream of tourists for the over-banked city.
Lending to tourists remains mostly off-limits due to the amount of information a mainland borrower would have to provide to apply for credit cards and mortgage loans.
The services that are in some demand - local and foreign-currency accounts, online stock trading and foreign exchange - are not particularly profitable.
However, most are hoping returning visitors will buy wealth-management products.
'What Hong Kong banks can do is to fill in the gaps these mainland banks cannot serve,' said Li Siu-kei, an assistant general manager at the Hong Kong branch of Bank of Communications.
'We would be looking at [certain factors such as] investment services and wealth-management services whose markets are not yet mature on the mainland.'
Meanwhile, some of Hong Kong's locally incorporated banks are viewing the wave of mainland tourists as a conduit to building its brand on the mainland, where they are also seeking to make inroads.
'We will try to refer the right customers back to our China branches,' Mr Tong said.
