HSBC to open Ocean Centre, Causeway Bay branches 7 days a week to tap rising mainland Chinese demand

Publish date: 2024-05-09

The branches at Ocean Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui, Park Lane Hotel in Causeway Bay and Kwun Tong will extend their banking hours to 5pm on Saturdays – instead of closing at lunchtime – from March 25, the bank said on Monday. These branches will also open between 2pm and 5pm on Sundays.

The extended opening hours come after more than a million mainland tourists visited Hong Kong in February, according to government data, more than three times the numbers recorded the previous month.

“After the removal of all Covid-19 restrictions, the daily average branch traffic of non-local residents in February more than doubled from January, largely driven by the increasing number of mainland China customers,” said Janet Pang, head of distribution, wealth and personal banking at HSBC Hong Kong.

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In fact, the bank found that the number of new account openings by non-locals in February was similar to levels recorded in the first half of 2019, before the city’s social unrest and three years of the coronavirus pandemic. Inquiries made on its hotline about account openings also rose 100 per cent in February from a month earlier, Pang said.

“We hope to offer the best customer convenience through piloting a seven-day operation at three branches, considering the usual arrival peak for mainland China and overseas visitors on weekends and the growing demand for banking services,” she said.

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Customers will need to book their appointments online in advance if they want to open accounts during weekend opening hours.

This is the first time in over a decade that HBSC has opened bank branches on a Sunday, a spokesman said. There is no word yet from Standard Chartered and Bank of China (Hong Kong), Hong Kong’s other two currency-issuing banks, if they will follow suit.

Mainland consumers make up the bulk of Hong Kong’s financial services customers. For instances, these consumers were the biggest spenders on Hong Kong insurance policies before the pandemic brought cross-border travel to a standstill. They spent HK$43.4 billion on life insurance policies in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.

HSBC will expand its manpower by 40 per cent in its international banking and insurance teams through temporary redeployment of staff from other departments and new hiring, Pang added.

About 98 per cent of the Greater Bay Area’s mainland Chinese residents were keen on opening accounts or holding investment products in Hong Kong, according to a HSBC survey conducted last year.

HSBC’s new strategy stands in sharp contrast with the period from February to April last year, when major banks in Hong Kong had to shut more than 600 branches amid the outbreak of Covid-19’s highly transmissible Omicron variant.

The bank did, however, open two new wealth management centres amid the pandemic, even if it temporarily closed 70 per cent of its 100 branches during the peak of the outbreak because of infections among its staff.

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