Innovating in the Company and Your Career: Steve Suarez and HSBC’s Innovation Unit
September 26, 2022
Not all learning & development activities are run by people in Human Resources. At HSBC, one of world’s ten largest banks, Steve Suarez is leading an effort to help all employees gain the skills they need to become innovators.
Suarez has been with HSBC for more than 18 years. During this time, he has served in various departments at the bank including Business Services, Risk Transformation, Innovation, Finance, and Compliance. He currently works in London as the Global Head of Innovation for Global Functions.
HSBC is a giant company, providing hundreds of products to more than 40 million customers in 63 countries. How does your organization fit into the bigger picture?
Our team’s goal is to enable innovation. What we really do is create the right environment for people to innovate – a psychologically safe place where people can experiment and try out their ideas. My goal is to make it very cheap, fast, and frictionless to experiment, and for people to experience and understand new emerging technologies.
The huge size of HSBC has both advantages and disadvantages. So, another part of our role is to communicate the work we are doing so that people can leverage some of the things that have already been created. Few innovations arise out of nothing; most build on previous ones and add something new. We might already have a solution to a challenge they’re facing, or our work might spur them to think differently about how they do business.
When we talk about climbing the corporate ladder, the path isn’t always straight. How did you arrive at your current role?
I went to high school in New Jersey and then joined the army back in 1991, mainly because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wanted something that would help me gain experience and get out of my comfort zone, which the army sure did. I learned a lot, not only about the job but also about myself. That motivated me further my education once I left. The army even helped pay for my undergrad and MBA through the US GI Fund.
After the army, I had a handful of jobs, including Regional Sales Manager, Client Partner, and Director of Program Management. In 2004, I joined HSBC to run program management and transformation in the US. I managed IT for consumer lending, mortgage, and auto finance. Then, I got the craving to work more internationally, and I considered leaving. When I told my boss, she asked, ‘what do you want to do?’ I said, “I’d love to go back to Paris, since I studied there when I was younger.” Within about two weeks, she had me on a plane interviewing for a role in Paris. We lived in France for about four years, where I ran change management for the 22 countries in Europe.
I moved here to the UK almost nine years ago to lead risk management for transformation. The same thing happened again; eventually, I got tired, and I wanted to move on to do something different, and that’s where the opportunity came to drive an innovation program.
At that point, I didn’t know much about innovation; I was interested in it but didn’t know how to drive it. So I went back to school: I joined the Stanford Entrepreneurship and Innovation Program, and a lot of the learnings were fantastic. I could apply them directly to what we were doing in our group. But I wanted to learn more. That’s where MIT came in. I did the Advanced Certification for Executives (ACE) in Management Innovation and Technology. This brought in a lot more of the technical aspects – for example, blockchain and IoT insights, which were very helpful to bring back to the bank.
Why did they choose you, as a risk management person, to lead an innovation unit?
As it was a growing area of interest in the market and to me therefore, I asked if I could take it on for risk and my manager supported it. I pulled together a small core team who worked side of desk to help create a network of people with similar interests to enable a crowd-sourcing and fast delivery approach. It grew from there!
The past decade of digitally-powered, data-driven business, is forcing industries to innovate at break-neck speeds. A 2019 BCG study, before the pandemic, found that while more than 80% of companies accelerated their transformations in 2019, 70% fell short of their objectives. The pandemic also forced companies to accelerate their changes. How is HBSC managing through these turbulent times?
When COVID hit, I heard people say it was the bullet train to digitization. Every business model and every company needed to be able to communicate through the internet instead of face-to-face, so it was either digitize or fail. That forced us all to be more digital, and it wasn’t that they thought a couple of years would be enough for a business to be digital. It forced a lot of us to get out of our comfort zone and learn about these new technologies so that we could drive them in our businesses.
People at all levels need to be educated on the possibilities of new emerging technologies. For example, we partnered with Oxford University to teach our employees about fintech and decentralized finance. We made these online courses voluntary, but available to everybody regardless of what their jobs were. The interest level from across the company has been huge. It’s great to see how many HSBC people are putting their certificates on LinkedIn. They’re proud to have learned these new topics.
Not everybody in HSBC is building technology solutions. Why would they want to take courses on technology and why would you want them to?
Looking forward, HSBC and all companies will need to stay ahead of fast-moving technology trends. Not everybody needs to be a programmer, but everyone can benefit from knowing more about technology. It can help them be more comfortable having discussions about technology; to make it less intimidating. One example is the rise of citizen developers who create pathways for people to learn about emerging technologies like AI and machine learning. Another example is how banks are looking at fintech as partners rather than competitors, working with them to investigate innovative new ways of doing business.
How are we going to build a program to upskill our colleagues so they can get involved in new technologies? It’s great if you have all the money to go out and recruit people who have quantum skills. But in reality, you can’t, and it’s not cost-effective to do that. You have to have a balance to bring in the right people while also investing in the people you have, upskilling them with these new technologies because they already understand your organization.
This is one of the reasons that we are so excited about what the Global Opportunity Initiative is doing. The GOI is connecting with companies around the world to find and develop best practices on how to give the right skills to the right people in the right way. People need help to make progress in their careers and companies need help to fill their skilling needs. I’m proud to play a strong role in this community. The GOI Europe event we’re hosting this spring will be an important step in helping to make the promise of the GOI into a reality.
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