Compared with other brands' sites, HSBC's website delivers little in terms of emotional benefit. (If some readers ever wonder what "thinking out of the box" means, this is it.) To the bank's credit, its web presence does fulfill most expectations from a purely functional standpoint. As a corporate portal, it overflows with information for a broad audience of stakeholders, from stock analysts to investors and retail customers. Through a pull-down menu, those customers have access to the entire worldwide network and, in the US, can choose between the English, Spanish and Chinese languages. In terms of content, it is both ambitious and impressive.

The unfortunate blandness of HSBC's site contrasts with the remarkable dynamism that the bank demonstrates over and again offline. The fact is that many, if not most, corporate portals fall into the same quagmire: trying to be everything to everybody every where, they end up pleasing no one. This is no excuse, as this column has reviewed numerous corporate websites that have successfully raised the challenge and are worth benchmarking. HSBC's does not count among those yet.