First month

First week of work: May 24, 27-31

May 24: May 27 was actually my second day at work. I entered HSBC at May 24, in which I met with the HR and they discussed the rules of working as an intern in the building. It was easy talking to the HR because they were fellow interns as well and I knew them from DLSU. They then told us what department we’ll be in and introduced us to our immediate supervisor. I was with another fellow intern in the same department. She has a different supervisor from me and a different task. I was introduced to my immediate supervisor Ms. Mina, but the other supervisor, Ms. Yvonne was the one who oriented us the works of the department. I was placed in the Payments and Cash Management Department of HSBC, located at their office in the Fort. The payments and cash management department deals with corporate banking which means that their clients are companies. Ms. Yvonne explained that the department is divided into three sections, Products, Sales and Clients. I was placed in the Products section while my other fellow intern was placed in the client section. Since Ms. Yvonne was the one who oriented us, a specific task was discussed to my fellow intern and not me. She was in charge of placing calls to the banks’ clients and was asked to confirm if the client received an email regarding the EUROMONEY which is a competition between banks for the best Payments and Cash management department. Since HSBC has won this award the past two years, the bank is very aggressive with this title once again, as their main competitor is Citibank. As the task was being explained to my fellow intern, I was left wondering what to do. After the orientation, on my first day, I barely did anything. I did the basics of preparation such getting my ID for access to the building and to my department. I barely did anything on my first day. Ms. Mina just gave me my own username and password for access to the computer and to the banks files. But at this point, a specific task was not assigned to me. I waited the whole day, observing the office and the computer and getting to know my intern.

May 27: On my second day,  I met another supervisor of mine who is also in charge of the Products section of the department, Ms. Shey. During this time, it was Ms. Shey who assigned me tasks to do for the day. I was given a file in which I was asked to add data in. I was asked to list products and services acquired by the clients and its corresponding pricing. These data were just base on another file, so basically I was just combining information from two different files. I was also asked to list the bank that these clients acquire services from as well as the average daily balance needed to maintain by each of these clients based on the agreement made with HSBC.  I was also given another file in which I had to analyze the clients lacked data on the products they acquired as well as the corresponding pricing.

May 28: During this day I was assigned a different task. I was asked to research and prepare a paper on the backgrounds of the 5 banks with alliances with HSBC. These are BPI, BDO Unibank, UnionBank, Robinsons Bank Corp and PNB. In this research I had to find information such as their corresponding banking status in the country. However the alliance banking status of these banks with HSBC was unknown to me as this is unsearchable.

May 29: On this day I was asked to document offer letter receipts. These receipts were those that were signed by receiving clients and the date it was received regarding the letter that was sent out to the clients. I was asked to document the date it was received, who received it and when the letter was sent out. After documenting these receipts, I filed it as well. After doing this, I was tasked to research and prepare a paper on the banking industry in the Philippines, in which I found out that the forecast of the banking industry this year is positive especially since of the positive growth of the country’s economy.  I was also asked to research and prepare a paper on the top 10 banks in the country. I found banks ranked in terms of assets and deposits from data presented by the BSP.

May 30: On this day, I just continued the documentation and filing of the offer letter receipts. I also was asked to do a clean-up of the email database of HSBC’s clients. This data contained around 1000+ clients. I had to look at which email seemed invalid as well as separate multiple emails typed into one cell in excel, into individual cells.

May 31: On this day, I just continued with the clean-up of the email database of HSBC clients. During this day, one of the personnel in the department resigned and free food was offered to us.

June 3-4: I was asked to continue my research and writing a paper regarding the banking industry in the Philippines as well as the clean-up of the email database.

June 5-7: During these three days had to be the slowest days at the office since I started. I was literally doing nothing. It was new for me because usually at least one of my supervisors would assign me something to do. I waited and waited, but as I looked at them, they seem to busy to actually notice that I was even here. By the end of the week, I found out that another personnel resigned from the department, she just happened to be one of my supervisors, Ms. Shey, resigned, which was the reason why I was doing nothing during these days. I guess they were busy finalizing the tasks that were associated with Ms. Shey. I did get free pizza at the end of the week though. I was sad that Ms. Shey resigned because she was actually the supervisor who actually assigned me work, Ms. Mina seemed to busy or simply didn’t have any tasks for me to do. Ms. Shey was also the boss who was easier to talk to. I didn’t know what to expect the next few days into my work.

June 10-14, 17-21, except 12 and 18.

No work on the 12^th and I was absent during the 18^th. The rest of the time however, I was asked to do one task. I was asked to help out my fellow interns with their task, which has no connection to the product team that was assigned to. I was asked to do calls to clients regarding the Euromoney survey. I think this is because that they are badly in need of votes from the clients. By the time I started calling, there were only around 20+ confirmed votes in which the bank needed around 600+ votes. So I placed calls to clients and encouraged them to vote for HSBC in this survey. At first I was kind of scared to even place a call, because I was afraid of the unknown, yes the call can be scripted but I was afraid of a question that would be asked and I would not be able to answer. But as I placed a few calls, I soon got the hang of it and was able to have a freer flowing phone call. In doing this I remembered a conversation I had with Ms. Shey before she resigned and before me knowing that she was resigning. She asked me if I would want to do something that would be repetitive or would want to do different assigned tasks instead. I said that I wanted the different assigned tasks because doing the same thing over and over again can get boring. For the first two weeks in work, I liked what I was doing, I enjoyed learning about the bank and how the bank works. I would listen on conversations between personnel in the office and find out about the status of HSBC. But during these past two weeks, I can’t say I enjoy what Im doing. I get bored easily, but then as an intern you can’t really be choosy with the tasks that are assigned and when something is assigned to you just do it.

On June 19 however, another personnel from a different team, Ms. Angie, assigned me to do a task, in which I was happy to do. Ms. Angie discussed to me that they are looking on taking on call centers as clients, these being Accenture, Convergys, Teleperformance and the like. I was given a file on the financials of these institutions and was asked to research on this and verify the data that was on the file and if there were certain changes that needed to be made. Also on this day, I found out that another personnel from the department resigned and was treated to another round of pizza. It’s kind of sad really that from the month that I’ve been in the company, already three people resigned.

Overall my experience in the HSBC has been okay. I like the people here because they are all really nice and I don’t get to say the share the same stories as other people who are interning in other companies with horrible bosses. It would just be an even more fulfilling experience if I were asked to do much more and learn more during my stay here. Hopefully the next two months will be better.