Group General Manager and Global Head of Liquidity and Cash Management
The digital transformation Diane Reyes has been leading at HSBC for the past few years could be described as life-saving.
Under her leadership, the global banking giant added four more real-time payments schemes in 2020, helping governments and corporations that needed to make rapid payments for medical supplies during the pandemic.
Those four projects brought its overall total to 22 and contributed to an 81% increase in its real-time payment volume over the previous year.
The pandemic also brought about a change in Reyes’s leadership style. Previously, she would never share her emotions with colleagues. But periodic check-ins Reyes scheduled with her team during lockdown, and the personal stories her colleagues shared, have fostered deeper connections. For instance, one had lost three family members to COVID-19; another was going blind.
“I realized that if we hadn’t held these check-ins, they may not have shared their situations and not received the appropriate support as a result,” Reyes said.
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Still, when her sister-in-law contracted COVID, Reyes initially kept it to herself, struggling through meetings while receiving updates from family. “After my sister-in-law sadly passed away, I was on a call and was asked, simply, how I was feeling. I got emotional as I gave my answer, as shortly after the call I was going to her funeral.”
Such candor would have mortified Reyes pre-COVID, but something had shifted. “We’ve let colleagues into our lives. We see each other’s homes, pets, children, and it’s helped us build stronger, more human relationships with each other,” she said.
The business Reyes has helped build at HSBC has gotten stronger too. As head of global liquidity and cash management, she oversees an operation that has 9,000 employees serving 40,000 large corporate and midmarket companies and 1.5 million business banking clients in more than 50 markets. Five global service centers process more than 6 billion payments annually, at an average value every second of more than $21 million.
Reyes has been sharpening digital capabilities to support continued growth while managing information security and cyber risk. In recent years, her work has involved adding robotics process automation, blockchain, mobile technology, application programming interfaces and biometrics — all of which have become especially important since the pandemic hit.
Last year an additional 16,000 clients used the suite of tools HSBC offers through its Liquidity Management Portal, and downloads of HSBCnet mobile solutions rose 146% year over year, with mobile payment volumes rising 151%.
That is just scratching the surface on a dizzying array of initiatives, including playing a role in raising critical liquidity for HSBC itself, with a deposit campaign increasing average balances 18% from 2019 to 2020; adding virtual debit cards, multicurrency digital wallets and sustainable commercial cards that should eliminate 73 tons of plastic waste each year; and positioning HSBC at the forefront of central banks’ exploration of digital currency, in part by actively engaging with the banks as they consider implementation.
One of the many notable successes was
As a group general manager, Reyes is HSBC’s highest-ranking female executive based in the United States.
She represents HSBC on the board of the Private Export Funding Corp. and has attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, speaking there in 2020 about the role that new technology like software robotics will play in the future of payments.
Reyes, who worked at Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase before joining HSBC in 2011, has been a mainstay in the Most Powerful Women rankings, but this will be her last year. She announced in July that
