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Enoch Yiu

Bobo Chan

HSBC and Standard Chartered’s expansion plans in the Greater Bay Area face headwinds from the Covid-19 pandemic, and finding the right talent remains a major challenge for the banks, senior executives of the two lenders said.
Both banks have announced aggressive hiring plans to develop their business in the bay area, but cross border travel for the banks’ executives has proved to be highly impractical as they have to spend two weeks in quarantine on both sides of the border.
They said that it was important for the banks’ executives to travel easily between Hong Kong and the mainland.
“It should be a journey of just about one to two hours between the Greater Bay Area cities and Hong Kong, but now it seems one has to spend up to 21 days [in quarantine] to cross the border,” said Daniel Chan Hing-yiu, who was appointed as the head of Greater Bay Area at HSBC, a newly created post, in March.


HSBC, the largest bank in Hong Kong and Europe, has big plans for the bay area. It has spent about US$150 million since 2019 on its first global training centre in Nansha, Guangzhou. Known as the HSBC University, the 11-storey centre will open in 2024 to provide training to over 14,000 HSBC employees in Asia-Pacific as well as senior global executives each year.
The bank also plans to grant up to HK$8 million in scholarships over the next three years for up to 100 Hong Kong undergraduates who want to work or study in the Greater Bay Area.
“Finding the right talent would be a major challenge in developing [HSBC’s business] in the Greater Bay Area,” Chan told an online panel discussion on the Greater Bay Area organised by The British Chamber of Commerce on Thursday.
The immediate challenge for the bank is to find and hire the right mix of talent - those with international experience and also people who understand the local culture, regulations and how business works in the Greater Bay Area, he added.
In February 2019, Beijing unveiled a blueprint for the Greater Bay Area, comprising nine mainland cities as well as Hong Kong and Macau, that included measures to draw capital and talent into the area to help turn it into an economic powerhouse.
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“It is important to reopen the border so as to allow our staff to travel between Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area cities easily,” Anthony Lin, Standard Chartered’s Greater Bay Area chief executive, told the conference from Guangzhou.
He also said that he wanted to see regulatory changes to make it easier for companies to relocate staff from Hong Kong to other bay area cities, as the current regulatory framework and application procedures made it difficult to relocate staff.
Lin earlier told the Post that his bank aimed to triple its income from the area over the next five years and there were plans to increase its headcount in the mainland Chinese cities of the bay area from 1,400 now to 2,500 in 2023.




Jennifer Van Dale, partner and head of employment for Asia at legal firm Eversheds Sutherland, told the panel that it was important to attract international talent to the Greater Bay Area.
“In Silicon Valley, it’s not just people from California, you have people from Eastern Europe, from Asia, from everywhere,” she said.
Hong Kong, as an international city, has attracted many expatriates from different parts of the world, and these expatriates could help the development of the Greater Bay Area, she added.


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HSBC and Standard Chartered, which have announced big expansion plans in the Greater Bay Area, want cross-border travel restrictions to ease as they face headwinds from the pandemic
Greater Bay Area needs a mix of local and international talent, just like Silicon Valley



HSBC and Standard Chartered, which have announced big expansion plans in the Greater Bay Area, want cross-border travel restrictions to ease as they face headwinds from the pandemic.


Greater Bay Area

HSBC