Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp, the city's largest retail bank, will deploy a range of technologies - including an application for Apple's iPhone 3G handset - this year to bolster its consumer financial services operations.
Breaking with its traditionally conservative approach to adopting innovation, the bank has formed a new unit called Business Solutions to swiftly identify, evaluate and create prototypes for new technologies beyond the industry's typical channels, such as internet banking.
Peter Brooks, the head of Business Solutions, said this year's projects included application widgets for the online banking page, Wi-fi connection and radio frequency identification (RFID) at all premiere centres, as well as text-to-speech and remote video-conferencing services.
'You can imagine in an organisation of this size, technology projects often are large and can take a reasonable period of time to deliver,' Mr Brooks said. 'What we're looking for in Business Solutions are short-term deliverable projects which are simple, low-cost and can be developed fast to show how it can add value to the business.'
He noted that close to half of HSBC customers were either 'digital natives' or 'digital adaptives', individuals to whom technology - including instant messaging, blogs social networking and internet search use - 'is a big part of their lifestyle'.
That led his team to introduce widgets - portable chunks of software code used to add content to a Web page. The free, downloadable widget provides snapshots of the Hang Seng Index, stock quotes, exchange rates and interest rates in a small box with the HSBC logo on the online banking page.