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.
What 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.
Other 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)
See 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 · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks
Calendar not loading? Open it on cal.com or email hello@tenhaw.com.