Top of main content

Mobile App Privacy Statement

Mobile App Privacy Statement

 

HSBC is committed to protecting your privacy when you use HSBC Mobile Services. This U.S. Mobile Application Privacy Statement ("Statement") explains how we collect, use, share, and safeguard your information when you use our Mobile Services.

HSBC = HSBC Bank USA, N.A., its banking and non-banking U.S. affiliates and subsidiaries and service providers (collectively, "HSBC USA", "we", "our").

HSBC USA collects, uses and shares information about you so that it can provide you with a bank account and related services. This Statement explains how HSBC collects, uses and shares your information when you use this app, including information about the device that the app is installed on (e.g. your mobile phone or tablet). You can find full information in our main privacy notice here.

This app is provided by HSBC Global Services (UK) Limited for and on behalf of HSBC USA, and all products and services accessed via this app are provided by HSBC USA.

You can contact our Customer Service Center here.

We use a range of measures to keep your information safe and secure which may include encryption and other forms of security. We require our staff and any third parties who carry out any work on our behalf to comply with appropriate compliance standards including obligations to protect any information and applying appropriate measures for the use and transfer of information.

We’ll keep your information in line with our data retention policy. For example, we’ll normally keep your main banking information for a period of seven years from when our relationship with you ends. This allows us to comply with legal and regulatory requirements or use it where we need to for our legitimate purposes such as managing your account and dealing with any disputes or concerns that may arise. We may need to keep your information for longer where we need the information to comply with regulatory or legal requirements, help detect or prevent fraud and financial crime, answer requests from regulators etc.  If we don’t need to keep information for this length of time, we may destroy, delete or anonymize it sooner.

This section explains what information HSBC collects from your device, how it uses it, and whether it shares it. In some cases, e.g. when accessing the contacts stored on your device, or photos that you take with your device, HSBC will first ask your permission. HSBC may share your information with other HSBC group companies and any sub-contractors, agents or service providers who work for us or other HSBC group companies (including their employees, sub-contractors, service providers, directors and officers) to provide you with products or services that you ask for (such as bank accounts and payments) and as explained in our main privacy notice - this type of data sharing is not included here.

Permissions for devices:

  • Location: Your approximate location can be used to prevent fraud when you’re using the HSBC app.
  • Device information and internet access: This allows us check if you have a working internet connection.
  • Biometric information: This allows you to use biometrics authentication (like fingerprints or facial recognition) to logon to our app. If you do so, we rely on your device’s technology to authenticate you and we do not collect or store your underlying biometric data.
  • Device camera and photo library: This allows you to take a photo or video and immediately share it with us or access the content from the photo library in order to allow us to provide you with a bank account or related services. 

Non-exhaustive examples of when we may ask you to do this include to scan a QR code to make a payment, to pay with a check by taking a photo of it.

  • Push messages: This allows you to receive instant notifications from our app about activity on your account or to inform that you’ve received a chat message from HSBC.
  • Contact details: This allows our app to access your contacts so that you can transfer money to people in your address book using their phone number or email.  

Permission specific to iOS devices:

  • App tracking transparency: This allows you to grant us the permission to track your activities across other companies’ apps and websites (versions iOS 14.0 and above only).

Permission specific to Android devices:

  • External storage device (for example memory card): This allows the app save files onto your device's external storage. This allows you to store and send documents, for example loan agreements, e-statements. 
  • Application permission: This allows Google Play Store to record where you downloaded the HSBC app from.

Tools:

Our app includes tools that collect information about your device and the way you use it online to:

  • allow you to log on to our app,
  • provide our app's core services and features, and measure their performance,
  • protect the security of our app, for example, to make sure the app is only accessed by genuine users,
  • help us to identify suspicious behavior on our app so we can protect both you and us from fraud,
  • ensure our app's optional features and services work, which may include both allowing us to customize what you see on our app and where based on what we know about you, and also helping to prevent fraud and maintain security on other apps, websites or services that you haven't asked to use when you're on our app,
  • enable us to understand how you use our app, so that we can improve how our app works, e.g. by using analytics providers to identify and count uses of our app and to see which pages people go to and what they do there, and
  • understand what you're interested in on our app and on social media, and potentially identify what directed you to our app, so that so we or our partners can personalize our marketing to you.

Some of these tools are provided to us by external service providers and third parties. You can find more information about these in our Online Privacy Statement.

We're here to help you. Find the answers and while you're at it, tell us how we could do better.