Through a collaboration with Mainboard-listed healthcare provider Raffles Medical, HSBC Singapore has set aside a portion of its 4,300 sq ft Star Vista Wealth Centre for a health screening clinic — an unusual sight in a banking facility.
The Health and Wellness Centre, as it is called, exclusively serves HSBC bank customers undergoing medical underwriting for their HSBC Life Singapore policies and at no extra cost.
“Typically, insurance companies will ask customers to book an appointment to do their medical [assessment], wait for the results and come back. Right here, the customer can just walk into the clinic that we have within the premises,” says Harpreet Bindra, CEO, HSBC Life Singapore.
With a dedicated doctor on-site, the range of health screening services includes pre- and post-health screening, consultations, blood tests, specimen collection and even treadmill assessments.
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HSBC “takes care of the rest”, says Bindra, who was appointed CEO in September 2023. “We communicate the results to the customer and issue the policy. All the friction that you see in the process, we have eliminated.”
This has cut the turnaround time for policy issuance by up to 30%, according to Bindra. “A lot of the time, the delay is not on the side of the insurer, but customers take their own time to book appointments and so forth. Here, it’s a really seamless customer experience.”
The two firms are no strangers to each other; Raffles Medical has provided medical underwriting and wellness services to HSBC Life Singapore customers for over a decade. As part of an “enhanced partnership”, customers covered by the insurer also enjoy cashless arrangements for outpatient care, 24/7 concierge and emergency care coordination, discounted health screening packages, telemedicine services and early detection initiatives.
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This time last year, the bank announced the largest update to its Premier and Premier Elite offerings in over two decades. HSBC’s Premier customers, or those with a minimum total relationship balance (TRB) of $200,000 with the bank, enjoy wealth management solutions, complimentary insurance provided by HSBC Life Singapore and 24/7 mental health teleconsultations. Above that is the Premier Elite tier, where customers must maintain a minimum TRB of $1.2 million and qualify as accredited investors.
“The launch of our new Health and Wellness Centre delivers on our ambition to offer the most complete integrated wealth and health proposition in the market while providing a differentiated Wealth Centre experience that goes beyond traditional banking,” says Ashmita Acharya, head of international wealth and premier banking, HSBC Singapore.
From left: Harpreet Bindra, CEO of HSBC Life Singapore; and Ashmita Acharya, head of international wealth and premier banking, HSBC Singapore
Banking refreshed
This is HSBC’s third Health and Wellness Centre globally, after two in Hong Kong. HSBC Wealth Centre at The Star Vista, which houses the clinic, opened in April as part of three facilities planned for 2025.
HSBC opened the first wealth centre in June 2024, a 1,447 sq ft space on the ground floor of Marina Bay Financial Centre (MBFC) Tower 2. The next unveiling will be for its Marine Parade Wealth Centre, which will not have a Health and Wellness Centre.
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Last year, HSBC announced it would increase its investment in physical networks fivefold as it pivots its branches into wealth centres.
Acharya has remained tight-lipped about the cost of upgrading the bank’s six locations — which also includes Claymore Hill, Raffles Place and Serangoon Garden — instead saying a “decent amount of investment” is being spent to refresh HSBC Singapore’s “entire infrastructure”. “What we are doing is refreshing them to provide an ambience for clients to really have those more thoughtful, meaningful conversations.”
Refreshing the wealth centres is just “one of the elevations” in HSBC Singapore’s proposition, she adds. “We’ve launched new products, we’ve launched new platforms [and] we’ve launched [on] our mobile app our new Future Planner [tool]. We see a tremendously high acceleration in our wealth clients, our net new invested assets, as well as our wealth revenue. So all these metrics are moving in the right direction, which makes us very confident the overall strategy is working.”
HSBC reported double-digit growth in client numbers in Singapore for its “mass affluent and high-net-worth segment” from 2019 to 2022, and this “continued to grow” in 2023.
According to the bank, it retained its momentum among Premier and Premier Elite customers in 2024. “We continue to grow our affluent business, and saw double-digit y-o-y growth in affluent and high-net-worth client numbers and assets under management as of end-2024.”
HSBC Singapore has also seen “double-digit y-o-y growth” both in the number of cardholders as well as card spend as of end-2024.
Even as banks and financial institutions jostle for market share among affluent Singaporeans, Acharya sees “a lot of value” in the retail banking space.
Customers in HSBC’s Personal Banking tier must maintain a minimum balance of $2,000 after they open an Everyday Global Account or be subject to a $5 monthly service fee.
“Transactional banking is a very important pillar for us. The earlier a customer starts their relationship with us, the deeper the trust is,” says Acharya, who joined HSBC in January 2023 after more than 20 years at Citi, where she was retail banking head for Singapore.
While Acharya acknowledges her team “has an appetite” for this segment, she says it does not extend to “mass market” customers. “There has to be an aspiration around being with HSBC, [at least] a little bit… The way I see it, anyone who has emerging affluent or affluent aspirations is a client. It could be a 25-year-old starting their life with the right trajectory; absolutely, [they] should bank with us.”
Expansionary mode
Global affluence is expected to rise by about 20% over the next five years, and Singapore is gaining in attractiveness “every day” as a destination for wealth, says Acharya.
More than half of HSBC Singapore’s clients are offshore, and the bank has doubled offshore wealth from China and India in the three years till end-2024.
Wealthy clients value the personal touch. According to HSBC’s Affluent Investor Snapshot 2025, 65% of the bank’s affluent clients in Singapore “still like the idea of a banker plus a specialist model”, says Acharya. “That appreciation for that sort of relationship is very important.”
But Acharya is aware that the average wealthy client wants “two or three” bank accounts. “They like the idea of a banker from one competitor and [another from] another competitor.”
That could change, as some wealthy clients are “losing a little bit of control” from having “diffused relationships” across multiple banks concurrently, she adds.
Acharya says HSBC Singapore “is in expansionary mode” for client-facing roles, fulfilling a plan that was announced alongside the wealth centres in June 2024. “We made a promise to expand our frontline teams by about a third by 2028. We are on track.”
HSBC is “one of the only international banks around”, says Acharya. “Clients are becoming more and more global in their mindset. Clients want to buy properties abroad; clients want to send their kids abroad; clients want to invest abroad in all of these needs. We stay right and centre. We have the expertise; we have the breadth of the franchise; we have the connectivity.”
The new wealth centres are “differentiators”, Acharya adds. “But you could also say every bank has wealth centres. What’s different? It’s how we utilise the wealth centres, how we think beyond just wealth to bring health into the wealth centres. These are the things that set us apart.”
Photos: HSBC
