The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) is one of the world’s largest banks. Thus, having an HSBC credit card means easy to recognize trust. There are a lot of advantages of getting an HSBC credit cards and disadvantages as well. However, since each HSBC jurisdiction (country) is different from the other, this article will focus on the credit cards issued by HSBC in the Philippines. Let’s begin.
It’s easy to get an HSBC credit card if you have an existing PH credit card
To be able to get an HSBC Philippines credit card, either you can apply for a credit card directly with HSBC and submit all the requirements that they are asking in their web site, or have an existing credit card for at least one year.
Your application may be rejected if you have bad paying records with any of the utility companies in the Philippines in which you have an account with. This is because your paying habits are submitted to the Credit Information Corporation. Thus, if you have been missing payments on the list of business entities that submit information to the CIC (https://www.creditinfo.gov.ph/list-submitting-entities-production), expect that you may have difficulties in getting an HSBC Credit Card.
In my case, I have a BDO Classic Visa credit card, which I got last December 2017. I applied for an HSBC Philippines Platinum Visa credit card after seeing a Free for Life advertisement from HSBC Philippines’ web site.
In this review, I will not focus on how you spend using your HSBC Philippines-issued credit card.
The Cards are Beautiful and Easily Recognizable
One of the advantages of having an HSBC credit card is that the design is wonderfully crafted by HSBC’s designers either in its headquarters based in London, or someone from their Asia headquarters in Hong Kong.
Any merchant seeing the HSBC credit card will give them assurance that the card holder has passed the stringent standards set by HSBC.
Awesome SMS alerts
Unlike the two largest credit card issuers BDO and Citibank, HSBC Philippines issued credit cards have SMS alerts provided for FREE. Initially, the SMS alert threshold is set at a high amount, but you can always call their hotline to set the alerts to a lower level.
You automatically get 3% rebate from participating Caltex gas stations nationwide.
With Citibank, you need to have a separate Citibank Shell Visa card to get rebates from shell and fulfill the requirements to get the up to PHP 15,000 worth of rebates from Shell. However, with HSBC, you no longer need to worry about this. Besides earning HSBC rewards points, you also get automatic rebates of up to PHP 7,200 per year and there are no questions asked.
It’s lower than Citibank’s maximum cap of PHP 15,000 but it’s much easier because you don’t to worry about doing some out of Caltex purchases.
Remember, you get the rebates if you don’t have an HSBC Cash Back credit card.
HSBC Philippines internet banking is really clean and neat.
I can give one big kudos to the internet banking site of HSBC Philippines, even though I only have access to the credit cards.
HSBC Philippines isn’t really keeping up with the times.
HSBC’s headquarters have done a great job in designing their credit cards. However, the Philippine unit of HSBC is not keeping up with the times when it comes to smartphone and internet banking
When I mean not keeping up with the times, I mean really not doing good job in doing partnerships with merchants.
There aren’t a lot of merchants that you can auto-charge to your HSBC credit cards.
The basics of living in a city are electricity, water bills and mobile phone bills. It’s sad to say that I wasn’t able to find Meralco (the leading electric company in the country) and any of the water providing companies even just in Metro Manila. Isn’t that disappointing?
The only companies which support auto-charge to HSBC credit cards are the following companies:
- PLDT
- Globe Telecom
- Innove
- SkyCable
- ZpDee Internet
- Sun Cellular
