HSBC: Designing the target operating model for 500 teams and a $450M portfolio
The challenge
HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division had no consistent operating model across 500 teams and a $450M budget. Every region had its own processes, creating fragmented delivery, unclear ownership, and unpredictable outcomes with little leadership visibility.
What we did
Brought in as Delivery Lead, James co-led the design, piloting, and refinement of a new target operating model with select GPS teams: standardised roles, governance and reporting; agile practices tailored for product delivery at scale; and metrics and dashboards for progress, dependencies, and value. The model was tested against real-world feedback with executive alignment throughout.
// run against The Tenhaw Way, published in full and free to adopt without engaging us
The outcome
Pilots validated the model, with improved predictability, clear ownership, and faster decisions. Blockers and dependencies surfaced earlier, and the framework is fully designed, tested, and ready for global rollout across all GPS teams in 2026.
Limits, and what is withheld
What transfers is the operating model work: defining roles, governance, reporting and value metrics once, so the fifty-first team to adopt a capability is cheap rather than a fresh negotiation. What does not transfer is proof at scale. The model was designed, piloted and validated against real feedback, global rollout is due in 2026, and nothing here has been through a rollout yet.
Why a buyer usually lands on this one
Written for the person arriving mid-programme with a question.
An operating model is where an AI programme either lands or does not
Standardised roles, governance and reporting sound like the least interesting deliverable on this site. They decide whether a capability spreads past the team that built it.
When an executive asks how to scale AI agents from one workflow to fifty, the constraint is almost never model capability. It is that fifty teams hold fifty definitions of done, fifty ways of deciding what to build and no shared metric, so every rollout is a fresh negotiation. A target operating model is what makes the fifty-first one cheap.
Payments carries its own regime
Global payments sits in the most resilience-sensitive part of a bank. The FCA and PRA operational resilience rules require firms to identify important business services, set impact tolerances and evidence they can remain within them through severe but plausible disruption. For entities inside the EU, DORA adds tested resilience, incident classification and reporting, and contractual control over critical third parties, which in practice now includes cloud and model providers.
An operating model with no view of which services are important, who owns them and how change flows through them cannot produce that evidence. Ours was a target operating model for product delivery rather than a resilience programme, and we did not work on operational resilience or DORA. The overlap is real: both regimes ask who owns this, how do you know it works, and what do you do when it does not, which are the same three questions the operating model has to answer for delivery.
Your context will differ from this one. Thirty minutes is enough to say by how much.
Talk it throughWhat this engagement does not claim
The same caveats the case studies hub carries, narrowed to this engagement so nothing here is a surprise to your analyst.
- 01
The HSBC operating model has not been rolled out.
It was designed, piloted with selected teams and validated against real feedback. Global rollout across the 500 teams is due in 2026.
- 02
The $450M is scope, not budget we controlled.
Read these at the scope we held. The budgets were in scope of the roles held rather than governed by us.
- 03
Some of this was James, personally.
Where an engagement was held as an individual role rather than delivered by a Tenhaw team, the narrative says James, not we.
If you want to know whether we have done your version of this, ask on the call and we will answer plainly.
Talk it throughOther engagements
Sector first, because that is the next question. All twelve are on the hub, grouped into the two we would call AI work and the ten we would not.
Roughly a year of stalled work, rebuilt as a working proof of concept in two weeks
12 months → 2 weeks, prior build effort rebuilt as a working proof of concept
Running agile at the top: a Scrum Master for the CIO's executive team
150+, global teams in scope
An AI Voice Insights platform projected to save 1.5M hours a year
1.5M+, hours/year of admin removed (projected)
Or skip the reading and ask which of these is closest to your problem.
Talk it throughSee how we did it
A real engagement walked through by the person who led it, then the same method applied to yours.
- The ways of working, published in full and free to adopt without hiring us.
- The target operating model James co-led at HSBC: designed and piloted for 500 teams, with global rollout due in 2026 and not yet rolled out.
- The AI build inside a live London specialty insurer: a working proof of concept, month by month, with the client anonymised to a market.
Everything the call covers about our work is already published on this site. What it adds is the person who did that work, and your own situation put through the same method.
The 30-minute discovery call starts with your problem. This one starts with our work.
Pick a time on cal.comWant the same thing, in your organisation?
A 30-minute call with James Rooney. We will tell you which parts of this we have done before and which we would be doing for the first time, and you will leave with a rough scope either way.
most start with a fixed-price AI Readiness Audit · £44,000 · 4 weeks · working prototypes
Calendar not loading? Open it on cal.com or email hello@tenhaw.com.
Questions about this engagement
Was the HSBC payments operating model a Tenhaw engagement?
No. James Rooney, Tenhaw's founder, was brought into HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division as Delivery Lead and co-led the design, piloting and refinement of the target operating model over six months. It sits on the site as founder track record, alongside his other delivery and transformation roles at HSBC, rather than as work delivered under the Tenhaw banner. The discipline it demonstrates is the one Tenhaw sells today. Designing an operating model at bank scale and then piloting it is a different job from drawing one on a slide.
How do you design one operating model for 500 teams?
You start with a handful of the 500. At HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division, a $450M portfolio, James co-led the design with select GPS teams first: standardised roles, governance and reporting, agile practices tailored for product delivery at scale, and metrics and dashboards covering progress, dependencies and value. The model was then piloted and refined against real-world feedback, with executive alignment maintained throughout. Pilots validated it, and the framework is fully designed and tested ahead of its global rollout across all GPS teams in 2026. Get the model right with a few teams before you ask hundreds to adopt it.
Why pilot an operating model before rolling it out?
Because an operating model that has only lived on a slide has never met a real team. At HSBC Global Payment Solutions, the target operating model was piloted with select teams and refined against real-world feedback before any global commitment. The pilots did two jobs. They validated the model, showing improved predictability, clear ownership and faster decisions, and they surfaced blockers and dependencies earlier. That evidence is what turns a 2026 rollout across 500 teams into a controlled step. Without it you are asking 500 teams to take a leap of faith.
Has the HSBC payments operating model rolled out yet?
Not yet, and the case study states that plainly. The model was piloted with select teams and validated against real-world feedback, and it is fully designed and tested, due to roll out globally across all Global Payment Solutions teams in 2026. What exists today is proof from pilots: improved predictability, clear ownership, faster decisions and earlier surfacing of blockers. Proof at scale arrives when the rollout does. Every study on the site is labelled this way, pilots as pilots and proofs of concept as proofs of concept, because a claim you can check is worth more than a bigger one you cannot.
What goes wrong when every region runs its own delivery processes?
HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division is a concrete example. Across 500 teams and a $450M budget there was no consistent operating model. Every region ran its own processes, which produced fragmented delivery, unclear ownership and unpredictable outcomes, and leadership had little visibility into any of it. The cost is not only inefficiency. It is that nobody can say who owns a decision or when work will land. The fix was one target operating model with standardised roles, governance and reporting, piloted with select teams and refined on real feedback before a global rollout.
What did six months of operating model work at HSBC cover?
Design, piloting and refinement of one target operating model. Brought in as Delivery Lead, James co-led the work for HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division: standardised roles, governance and reporting, agile practices tailored for product delivery at scale, and metrics and dashboards for progress, dependencies and value. The model was then tested with select GPS teams against real-world feedback, with executive alignment maintained throughout. By the end, pilots had validated it and the framework was fully designed and tested, ready for global rollout across all GPS teams in 2026.
How do you keep executives aligned during an operating model redesign?
Keep the alignment continuous. At HSBC Global Payment Solutions, executive alignment was maintained right through the design, piloting and refinement of the target operating model, so leaders watched it evolve against real-world feedback instead of being handed a finished document to approve. Then the pilots gave them results to look at, with improved predictability, clear ownership, faster decisions, and blockers and dependencies surfacing earlier. An executive who has seen a model survive contact with real teams needs far less persuading than one reading about it for the first time.
What should an operating model's dashboards actually measure?
Three things: progress, dependencies and value. That was the metrics layer built into HSBC Global Payment Solutions' target operating model, alongside standardised roles, governance and reporting, in a division of 500 teams and a $450M budget that previously gave leadership little visibility. In pilots, that visibility showed up as improved predictability, clear ownership and faster decisions, with blockers and dependencies surfacing earlier. A dashboard that tracks activity tells you people are busy; one that tracks progress, dependencies and value tells you whether the portfolio is actually moving.
What does payments operating model work have to do with agentic AI?
The transferable part is the operating model discipline itself. You define roles, governance, reporting and value metrics once, so the fifty-first team to adopt a capability is cheap instead of a fresh negotiation. That is the problem an AI programme hits at scale, where every new team otherwise renegotiates ownership, oversight and measurement from scratch. The study is honest about its limit. The model was piloted and validated against real feedback, and nothing in it has been through a global rollout yet, let alone an agentic one. Tenhaw's agentic design work applies the same discipline to organisations putting agents into real workflows.
Does agile actually work across hundreds of teams in a bank?
It works when it is tailored, and it fails when it is transplanted. In HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division, agile practices were adapted for product delivery at scale and embedded in a wider target operating model with standardised roles, governance and reporting. Nobody rolled out an off-the-shelf framework. Piloted with select teams and refined on real-world feedback, the result was improved predictability, clear ownership and faster decisions, with blockers and dependencies surfacing earlier. The scale is the notable part. That model is designed for 500 teams and a $450M operating budget, with global rollout due in 2026.
Is a banking AI target operating model worth it for a smaller bank?
Yes, because scale is not what makes one work. A banking AI target operating model is mostly a set of decisions you want to make once: roles, governance and reporting, and metrics for progress, dependencies and value. At HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division those decisions were co-designed with select teams, piloted and refined against real-world feedback before anything global was committed, so the working unit was a handful of teams even though the scope was 500 teams and a $450M budget. The HSBC model covered payments delivery. Agents were not in its scope. The components travel down to twenty teams without much trouble.
How do you get teams to give up processes they built themselves?
Design the replacement with some of them, not for all of them. At HSBC Global Payment Solutions, James was brought in as Delivery Lead and co-led the target operating model with select GPS teams, piloting it and refining it against real-world feedback, so the version now due for global rollout in 2026 has already been changed by the people who used it. The pilots gave teams a reason to move as well, with improved predictability, clear ownership, faster decisions, and blockers and dependencies surfacing earlier. People give up a process they built when the replacement visibly makes their week easier. That is a different argument from a mandate.
What should you standardise first when every team delivers differently?
Roles and ownership, before process. Across HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division the deeper problem was not that 500 teams worked differently; it was that nobody could say who owned a decision, so outcomes were unpredictable and leadership had little visibility across a $450M budget. The target operating model addressed that directly: standardised roles, governance and reporting, with agile practices tailored for product delivery at scale and metrics and dashboards for progress, dependencies and value alongside. In the pilots, clear ownership showed up next to improved predictability and faster decisions. Standardise a process before its owner and you get compliance without accountability.
What should we ask a firm proposing an operating model redesign?
Ask which teams will pilot it and what the pilot changed. A model that has never met a real team is a document. At HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division the target operating model was co-designed with select GPS teams, piloted, and refined against real-world feedback, and the pilots reported improved predictability, clear ownership, faster decisions and earlier sight of blockers. Then ask what the firm is not claiming yet. This study states that global rollout across all GPS teams is due in 2026 and has not happened. A firm that is careful about where its evidence stops is usually careful about the rest of its numbers too.
Should we just roll out our best region's way of working?
Rarely. A region's process carries the context that produced it, meaning its people, its products and the history behind every exception. HSBC's Global Payment Solutions division had all of that, with every region running its own processes across 500 teams and a $450M budget. What was designed instead was one target operating model for the division: standardised roles, governance and reporting, agile practices tailored for product delivery at scale, and metrics and dashboards for progress, dependencies and value, then piloted with select GPS teams and refined on real feedback. Your strongest region is a valuable input to that design rather than the design itself.