Eye on Cover Story
HSBC –
Leveraging Global Strength To Help NI Companies Through Crisis Like every other business in Northern Ireland, HSBC UKs Corporate & Business Banking operation in Belfast city centre found itself having to adapt to a brand new way of working six months ago.
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rea Director & Head of Corporate Banking Gillian Morris and her 18-strong team of relationship managers and support staff moved to home working at short notice. “Like everyone else, we’d been watching the progress of the pandemic very closely but I suppose it was when Leo Varadkar announced the closure of the schools in the south that we really saw the writing on the wall,” she says. Deputy Area Director Chris McQuay found himself in the role of last man standing. “I was still in the office when Gillian called and told me that I had to get myself off home,” he says. “It was a very strange feeling, effectively being the one who turned the lights off and headed up the road.” “But we had always had the ability to work from home in any case, so it really wasn’t too big a learning curve for us as an organisation,” he adds. The Belfast team’s move to remote working was being mirrored throughout the vast international machine that makes up HSBC. Particularly impressive was the speed at which HSBC’s large-scale customer contact centre were able to up sticks and move to effective
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and efficient remote working... something that few would have thought possible pre-Covid. “So we were ready and waiting to help our customers very quickly,” says Gillian Morris. “And we started reaching out to those customers immediately. Across the UK , colleagues across the Bank including our agriculture relationship managers (HSBC UK is a big player in the agri marketplace here) volunteered to help out with the effort to make sure that our business customers were being looked after. “There was a lot of distress and anxiety out there. Some companies had immediate cash flow needs to address, but there were lots of others who just needed some emotional support and to be reassured by the fact that we were here and ready to help if need be. “So we were calling customers asking if they were alright, if they had the facilities that they needed, if they needed to talk. That was what everyday banking was all about suddenly. And, for many customers, it was about short term funding requirements.” The senior team at HSBC UK agree with almost everyone else about the huge importance
of the immediate government assistance schemes announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak. “They made a big difference and had an enormous role to play,” says Chris McQuay. “The job retention scheme in particular was instrumental in saving many jobs in the early days of the crisis.” HSBC UK was one of the banks authorised from the start to administer the government CBILS and Bounceback loan schemes and was quickly involved in securing the government-backed funding for its customers. “We were seeing really solid businesses with good management teams trying to wrestle with the huge negative effects on those businesses,” adds Gillian Morris. “So we saw it as our role to be pragmatic, but also to be supportive. “But it was really hard to talk to very good businesses, who had been performing well before Covid, suddenly facing real, serious problems.” Gillian Morris and Chris McQuay both reckon that HSBC UK in Belfast stepped up to the mark. “In a nutshell, across the Bank we lent roughly the same amount of money that we’d expect to lend
