Maintaining Communication networks:
As per Othman, et al., (2019), the IT department is at the heart of establishing and maintaining communications networks for both large and small companies. Few businesses, large or small, could operate without a solid IT department, making them essential to a company's day-to-day operations. According to Mustafa, et al., (2018), IT is there to assist the company at every stage of this process, whether sending emails to resetting a password to data retrieval and everything. In the end, the goal of IT in the company is to assist the company to become more effective and productive.
Overcome difficult situations:
Bishop, (2018) stated, IT help managers to overcome difficult situations. The author also stated the ultimate purpose of data security is to prevent data from being tampered with. The IT department is responsible for ensuring data safeguarding, which means putting in place industry-standard controls to secure company-related data and employee sensitive information from destruction, loss, abuse, unauthorized disclosure, or change. IT must also guarantee that important data is protected from corruption, compromise, or loss in accordance with data protection rules. According to Hatlevik, et al., (2018), while it comes to a computer issue or problem, a skilled IT team is needed. Even when a worker has locked a computer, forgot the password, or is unable to access a specific drive, IT is usually only a phone call away from resolving the problem.
Assist in Business Planning:
According to Ul-Hameed, et al., (2019), Information technology can analyse specific information to assist in the planning of a business trip based on patterns and information offered in the data. IT can also provide firms with a plethora of tools that can help them tackle difficult business problems and plan for future growth. Since businesses have transitioned to the digital world and customers have access to the internet 24/7 through their smartphones, online marketing is something that companies simply can't live without nowadays.
Analysis and discussion:
The banking sector is generally the backbone of every country’s financial system. It is necessary to run this system without any disturbance. In the past, human-induced work in the banking system led to many errors which eventually affected the performance of the bank. The performance breakdown directly impacts the banks' user base and thus profit margin. Moreover, with technological advancement and work pressure getting high in this 21st century, the banking system needed to cope with the evolution. The surge in demand for internet and mobile banking mandates every bank to shift over digital technologies. In the past years, the global market has seen a boom for implementation. At present, banking industries without digital technology interference are not possible to think about. The IT and communication sectors thoroughly build the pathway for the development of the banking system from the grassroots level. To cope with the growing economy, it is very much necessary to have such a system working aside humans. ATMs, Internet Banking, Telephone and Mobile Banking, Digital payments in the banking atmosphere improves the overall banking operation (Sharma and Mittal, 2018). The sophistication the IT (Information Technology) sector offers to the banking system is commendable. Working together with communication and computer technologies, banks significantly improve their customer service experience which ultimately builds trust and user base and thus maximizes profits.
Advantages: There are several advantages of using IT technologies in the banking sector. Some of them are –
1. Extra gained trust: People all over the world select their banks for trust, experience, efficiency factors. HSBC from the beginning listens to its customers first. The want for hassle-free transactions over mobile banking was also implemented by HSBC in the UK first. Over the internet, with great online marketing HSBC gained some extra trust over its competitors. This would eventually help them to build the customer-bank relationship much stronger.
2. Increased Customer Base: Increasing its customer base as well as maintaining its service is the most important thing for the bank to run. Online integration of technologies helps the bank to reach more people thus increasing their customer base (IIDE. 2021). People also get a clear and transparent view of the bank and its service. This ultimately increases banks' productivity.
3. Efficient Management: It is much more difficult for a bank to maintain its service through the years. HSBC has maintained its customer base as well as its customer service through the years. Because of better and more efficient management over 15000 transactions all over the world take place on the HSBC server (hsbc, 2022). Management emphasizes the personalized offering of bank deals to help its customers and the whole process is managed online.
4. Systematic cost management: It's worth mentioning that by the online services overall running cost of the bank significantly drops. As over 1.2 billion log-ins were seen in 2020, the effective running cost of the HSBC website has gone down quite remarkably (hsbc, 2022). In general, the intermediary fees of transactions, banking services have been reduced.
Drawbacks:
1. Over-reliance on online methods: It is visible that HSBC though being a global entity relies upon an online system much more than usual. It is a genuine concern as the service might get hampered due to the internet breakdowns. It would create a massacre in the banking community.
2. Online Threats: HSBC’s banking system is said to be protected by blockchain technology. But it is observed that in the current scenario nothing is much protected from the threat. Moreover, if any wrong decision is made by an amateur user, there is no such method that could prevent it from happening. Banks couldn’t do much for this type of case.
3. Growing competition: Online introduction of banking services leads to huge competition in the market. This might have some bad sides too as the growing competition could potentially be a threat to HSBC. Standard Chartered, Barclays, RBS are some of the biggest competitors. They also serve their customers with utmost care and attention (technostacks, 2021). But when one leading bank decides a feature to get abolished, it directly affects users and proactively forces other banks to implement or abolish such a service or system. So, the growing competition ultimately could be a potential threat as this would cut down the efficiency. Apart from these drawbacks HSBC mainly finds itself in a safe place as this has a great trust among the competitors.
