HSBC First Impressions

It has been a few days since I posted about my HSBCdirect account update and I am now happy to report that I have received my temporary username and password.

First Impressions.
After taking a few minutes to go through the account registration process, which requires you to create your username, password, security key and security questions, I was logged into my account and began poking around. The first thing that I wanted to do was to create my recurring deposit for my automatic savings plan.

Initially I selected the “Transfers” option from the menu as I thought this would allow me to create my recurring deposit. Nope. Apparently this is for transfers between accounts held with HSBC, which this happens to be my only account with them so this screen was not of much use. My next selection was the “Bank To Bank Transfers”, which was the correct selection and allowed me to create my weekly deposit.

Not a Fan of Popups.
Clicking on the bank to bank transfer option, I was taken to a new page instructing me to click the “Continue” button and that a new window was going to open. Hmm, I don’t really care for this as I don’t like websites that require me to open new windows to perform a task. Once I opened this screen, it was quite simple to link in my checking account although I thought that link would have been established already since I had made the trial deposts.

After adding my checking account, I attempted to add my ING Direct savings account to see if I can do a bank to bank transfer between ING and HSBC. If that is possible, it will save me the step of sending the funds from ING Direct to my checking account and then from there, sending them to HSBC. We’ll see how that goes, look for an update some time next week.

Minor Complaints.
Once my accounts were setup, I began to explore more of the site. After running into a few more popup screens, I was looking at the account detail page and did not notice a listing of interest for the current month. With ING Direct, there is a display of the amount of interest you have earned up to the current day of the month and it is updated daily. This feature appears to be lacking with HSBCdirect. While not a big deal, I do enjoy seeing the current interest when I log into my account.

Another thing I did not particularly care for was that when I created my recurring deposit, it required me to enter the number of transactions. My preference would be to simply schedule the frequency and then have the deposit remain active until I cancel it as opposed to defining a set number of transactions. Since I am doing a weekly deposit, I set the number of transactions to 52 but that means I will need to update that next year.

Recap.
While I had been hoping to receive access to my account earlier in the week, I am happy to now have my HSBCdirect account established and the recurring deposit created. There are a few things that I am not particularly fond of yet but I think part of that is simply because I am not familiar with them. Once I use the site a little more and learn how things are done at HSBC, I think these minor issues will be less important.

After all, I think I can deal with a few minor inconveniences given that I will now be earning more interest than I was with ING Direct.

You may also like...

1 Response

  1. February 6, 2007

    […] discussing my first impressions of HSBC, I had commented on the ability to link my ING Direct Orange Savings Account to my new HSBCdirect […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *