Executive briefing · Market entry

One bank.
Two arguments.

HSBC runs six top-level categories in the United Kingdom and six in Hong Kong. Four are identical. The other two reveal two completely different theories of what a customer is.

Independent analysis · not commissioned by HSBC
Public retail websites, as observed July 2026
Mike Oustamanolakis · mikko.gr

01 · The surface

Identical at the top.
Not underneath.

MeasureUKHong Kong
Top-level categories66
Navigable links~155~190
Investing sub-sections48
Dedicated apps in navigation15

Investing occupies 11% of UK navigation space against 17% in Hong Kong — a 55% relative increase.

02 · The allocation

Where each market
spends its navigation.

Navigation space by category, HSBC UK and Hong Kong UK gives 26 per cent of navigation to Wellbeing and Help; Hong Kong gives 19 per cent to Insights and Offers. United Kingdom · ~155 links Banking: 21%21%Borrowing: 23%23%Investing: 11%11%Insurance: 19%19%Wellbeing: 16%16%WellbeingHelp: 10%10%Help Hong Kong · ~190 links Banking: 26%26%Borrowing: 24%24%Investing: 17%17%Insurance: 14%14%Insights: 7%7%InsightsOffers: 12%12%Offers

Fixed by the business   Discretionary

03 · The finding

Four slots are fixed.
Two are a choice.

Banking, borrowing, investing and insurance are set by the business. The remaining two are discretionary — and the choice is the result.

United Kingdom — 26%

  • Wellbeing
  • Help

Welfare and utility

Hong Kong — 19%

  • Insights
  • Offers

Market intelligence and commercial opportunity

04 · The absence

What isn't there
says more.

Under UK Wellbeing

  • Bereavement support
  • Losing your job
  • Mental health
  • Financial and domestic abuse
  • Support for gambling

Under HK Insights

  • Fund and bond screeners
  • FX outlooks
  • House views
  • ESG analysis
  • Stock quotes

There is no equivalent of bereavement support, job loss or mental health anywhere in the Hong Kong navigation. Not buried — absent.

And the UK has no stock screener, no IPOs, no warrants, no live market data.

05 · Reading the structure

Every slot is a claim
about who you serve.

  • Wellbeing at top levelUsers in difficulty are a primary case, not an edge case.
  • Insights at top levelUsers consume market intelligence routinely and expect direct access.
  • Offers at top levelUsers are motivated by incentive and go looking for it.
  • Five apps, not oneFinancial life is modular, and too varied for a single door.

06 · The correction

Neither one
is a mistake.

The UK structure is consistent with a regulatory environment that treats consumer protection as a duty. The Hong Kong structure is consistent with mass-market equity participation, where investing is an everyday behaviour rather than a specialist product.

Both are correct for the market they were grown in. The error is never the structure — it is moving one structure to a market it was not grown for.

07 · The implication

Information architecture
is not portable.

A navigation label is a promise. When it breaks, the user leaves — not because the content is missing, but because the path was built for someone else.

A company expanding across markets that ships its home structure unchanged is making a claim about its new customers it has never checked. This is why a product that performs at home can fail abroad without a single line of content being wrong.

The Hong Kong arrangement also carries a cost the UK's does not: a customer must know which category their app belongs to before they can find it. That assumes a product literacy the UK design never asks for.

08 · Next

The same reconstruction,
run against your navigation.

A 45-minute session for boards, product and design teams: the analysis, the method behind it, and what the same count reveals about your own structure.

mike@mikko.gr  ·  mikko.gr/hsbc

A longer treatment appears as a chapter in Compression vs Clarity, Naisu Press.
Frameworks: Pirolli & Card, information foraging · Norman, mental models