HSBC may have traded in its perfectly good old- fashioned name – Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation – for a bland multinational acronym and moved its global headquarters to London in 1993.

But HSBC was Hong Kong's “l(fā)ocal bank” long before it set out to be “the world's local bank”, as its marketing campaign likes to claim. Many stubbornly insist on calling it “Hongkong Bank”. More colloquially, it is known as “big elephant” in light of its weighting in the benchmark Hang Seng stock market index – the second-largest stock by market capitalisation. More mundanely, many of the local population have a proportion of their retirement savings in the stock.

Founded in Hong Kong and Shanghai 144 years ago, HSBC is one of the territory's three note-issuing banks alongside Bank of China and Standard Chartered.