Women to Watch 2023: Stephanie Ng, HSBC

Stephanie Ng

Global head of marketing, wealth and personal banking
HSBC
Hong Kong SAR 

HSBC is used to owning the banking landscape, but with swifter, nimbler digital financial services options popping up, the challenge to catapult the customer base, maintain brand value and expand global reach is tougher than ever. Stephanie Ng understands that all too well.

A digital pioneer with nearly two decades of marketing experience in various divisions of Standard Chartered, MasterCard, AIG and most recently, Meta, Ng knows a thing or ten about making brands grow, profit, and innovate in the financial sectors. Her passion for embracing digital transformation and understanding the changing needs of consumers has been rewarding for HSBC—a 158-year-old institution that is rapidly evolving to survive new competition.

In less than a year of taking the global head of marketing role in the Wealth and Personal Banking division, she has made a telling impact. The ‘From Silicon Valley to Sydney’ campaign and media partner Wall Street Journal aimed to connect the bank with a younger generation of determined and innovative investors and saw audience-targeted placements click-throughs at 2.6 times above the set benchmark. With concentrated marketing efforts like this, HSBC’s Wealth and Personal Banking division has seen an uptick in international customers in H1 2023, up 8% year-on-year.

Ng has also rolled out marketing efforts around the international proposition, which ties into the bank’s commercial targets of doubling global customers by 2025. An iteration with cricketer Virat Kohli released simultaneously across several markets like India, Singapore, Australia, UK and distributed across social platforms like YouTube, Disney+ Hotstar, among other channels, was a massive success. It yielded an 85% uplift in website traffic, over 470 items of editorial coverage, representing a total global campaign reach of almost 1.5 billion among other brand-building metrics.

Financial services as a sector is not always the most exciting creatively. Sometimes, the ads can be as mundane as the terms and conditions of the products on offer, but Ng’s team is consciously trying to break that rut. The result is elevated creativity recognised at over 30 international awards this year, including the Creative Circle Awards, D&AD, YouTube Awards and the Clios.

One of Ng’s biggest assets is her relentless focus on gender equality efforts. As a Malaysian woman who rose to the top of HSBC in Hong Kong, she knows the challenges and isolation female leaders often face. Determined to change that, Ng leads HSBC’s first Female Mentorship Programme for young rising women leaders to boost female presence in senior leadership roles—with a goal to increase women’s representation in leadership positions by 35% by 2025. 

She is also launching a Womens@HSBC networking initiative for mentoring young women and confronting taboo topics like fertility, miscarriage and menopause. She is not just a leader; she is a mover and shaker. And for that, Ng earns a coveted spot in the Class of 2023 Women to Watch.