HSBC Expat Hints & Tips, as it is called, goes live today, with more than 800 “bite-sized” pieces of information that HSBC Expat said has been culled from almost 20,000 bits of advice that its researchers collected over the five years they have been conducting the organisation’s annual Expat Explorer surveys.
The platform – actually an interactive website, which may be viewed by clicking here – is “tips from expats, for expats”, HSBC Expat said, in a statement announcing the new facility.
Visitors to the website are able to browse and filter through the material by country, topic, and what is called expat “life stages”. This enables expats “to find the hints and tips that are most relevant to them, whether they’re looking for tips about leisure activities in the UAE, or finding accommodation in Singapore,” HSBC Expat said.
New content will be added as visitors to the site contribute their own tips, or create lists of “top five tips”. This in turn will enable them to “share the knowledge and insights they wish they had known before embarking on a move abroad with other expats from around the world,” HSBC Expat said.
Although billed as a service to help expatriates, the new Hints & Tips website is also a potentially valuable marketing tool for HSBC, which is clearly hoping to promote itself as a friendly and trusted brand name to thousands of expatriates who may be thousands of miles from the HSBC branch they used to visit before they went abroad.
HSBC already has another tool in its toolbox for reaching expats in a friendly, helpful way: its so-called Expat Explorer Interactive tool. This enables users to interact with detailed insights from HSBC Expat’s annual Expat Explorer survey, through “data visualisations”, and to compare countries across a range of criteria.
Interactive ‘more useful’
Dean Blackburn, Head of HSBC Expat, said the thinking behind the high degree of interactivity offered by the new website was that it would help make the resource more useful and beneficial for its target audience than one that did not permit participation.
Moving abroad “can be a daunting prospect”, he noted, and HSBC felt it could provide “valuable and trusted insights into life as an expat around the world” by enabling expats to share what they had learned.
Expats are also encouraged by HSBC Expat to share their experience at its "blogspot.com" site, which is described as a "hub for all the latest expat conversations".
HSBC Expat is how Jersey-based HSBC Bank International is best known to many of its expatriate clients around the world. In addition to Jersey it has offices in Dubai, Hong Kong and Johannesburg.
