BANKS seek to inspire confidence and loyalty among their customers. Few would expect - or wish - to arouse nostalgia. After all, their clients live for the present and future, not for the past.
Yet nostalgia for a long-lost era of old-fashioned, local banking is precisely the reaction HSBC's decision to drop the traditional local names Hongkong Bank and the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation will inspire. Those titles, like the Midland Bank name in Britain and other solid, well-loved names elsewhere, are all set to disappear and be replaced with four cold, corporate initials.
HSBC: the letters symbolise state-of-the-art financial market efficiency, electronic screens and whizz-kid brokers - the world of initials and acronyms with no time for traditional nomenclature. It is not as if the Hongkong Bank was redolent of wooden panels, ink-stained desks and clerks shuffling paper. The impressive grey building which used to be the group's corporate headquarters and is still the heart and brain of the SAR's biggest financial institution, would never have been thought of as the home of an old-fashioned family bank. But it was a living link with the days when 'The Bank' was Hong Kong's quasi-central bank and the territory's only serious international financial institution.
However, the change of name is logical and inevitable. Corporate headquarters have moved to London. Expatriate bankers who used to sit on the Executive Council and decorate the society pages have moved with it. The old colonial role has gone, and the Monetary Authority plays the central bank role. In the next century, the Bank of China is likely to play the politico-financial role once assumed by 'The Bank'.
From their British base, HSBC chairmen now preside over a global banking empire which should function with the same corporate culture in London, Hong Kong, New Delhi, the Middle East or Shanghai. Local differentiation, though inevitable given the different conditions in which its branches operate, will be something the bank will now wish to minimise.
Some will no doubt continue to use the old names as if the new corporate branding decision had never been taken. But, in time, the letters HSBC will acquire their own familiar patina, like BMW or IBM, as customers accept that stark four-letter combination as something solid and reassuring, with a reputation of its own.