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How HSBC India Made Virat Kohli Forget His Own Legacy
HSBC India's 'My Account Starts Today' is a 2023 banking campaign created by Contract Advertising, a Wunderman Thompson South Asia group company, featuring cricketer Virat Kohli and built around HSBC's purpose of 'Opening up a world of opportunity' for aspirational Indians pursuing international goals.
HSBC India launched the campaign in June 2023, with Exchange4media reporting on it on 5 June and Brand Equity covering it on 6 June. The work marks the debut of Kohli as HSBC India's brand influencer, an association announced in April 2023 and designed to connect the bank's global proposition with one of the country's most recognisable public figures. In the Indian market, where aspirations toward international mobility and cross-border opportunity are accelerating across urban demographics, the choice of Kohli carries layered significance that extends well beyond conventional celebrity endorsement.
The campaign ran across television, print, outdoor, OTT platforms, and digital media, giving it a broad presence in India's fragmented but rapidly converging media landscape. The central film opens inside a cricket stadium and proceeds to show Kohli's name and image fading progressively from an Honours Board, a trophy cabinet, newspaper headlines, YouTube channels, and the dressing room wall. The sequence builds toward a moment of deliberate erasure: Kohli, helmeted and standing before a red dressing room door, addresses viewers directly, asking them to set aside everything they know about his cricketing past. When the door opens and he steps through, the red door transforms into the HSBC logo, and the tagline 'My Account Starts Today' appears. The metaphor is precise and unusually committed for a banking advertisement — reinvention is not framed as loss but as the precondition for new opportunity.
HSBC India targeted a specific and growing consumer segment with this campaign: urban Indians with international ambitions, whether in education, business, or personal finance. The strategic logic rests on the insight that for this audience, a banking relationship is not merely transactional but instrumental to crossing borders and accessing global systems.
India's banking sector is competitive at precisely this international interface. Citibank, which has historically served affluent urban Indians with global banking products, and Standard Chartered, which similarly positions itself around international connectivity, represent the closest competitive pressure on HSBC India's target segment. HSBC's differentiation lies in the scale of its global network and its explicit purpose statement, 'Opening up a world of opportunity,' which the campaign uses not as a slogan but as a structural brief. The campaign asks Kohli to embody that purpose not through aspirational rhetoric but through a narrative of personal reinvention that any viewer with international ambitions can map onto their own circumstances.
The broader Indian banking market context reinforces the strategic timing. India's digital banking and financial services adoption has expanded substantially in recent years, with a younger, globally oriented population increasingly willing to select banking partners based on perceived alignment with their life goals rather than branch proximity alone. As reported by moneycontrol.com, the Kohli association was framed by HSBC India as deliberately organic, a word Kohli himself used when he stated, according to moneycontrol.com, that the partnership 'would be very organic and natural and not be forced in any way.' That framing signals a strategic intent to avoid the transactional register that characterises most celebrity banking endorsements in India and instead to position the relationship as one of genuine shared values between brand, ambassador, and consumer.
Contract Advertising constructed the creative around a single governing idea, articulated by Rahul Ghosh, executive creative director and Mumbai creative head at Contract Advertising, as the principle that 'one makes history only when one forgets history.' That idea disciplines every creative decision in the film, from the choice of imagery to the structure of Kohli's direct address to camera.
The film's visual strategy is one of progressive subtraction. Kohli's name and likeness are removed, frame by frame, from the iconographic surfaces of Indian cricket — the Honours Board, the trophy cabinet, the press archive, the dressing room wall. Each erasure is legible to any Indian viewer who has followed the sport, which means the film is simultaneously a piece of national cultural shorthand and a universal story about the courage required to step away from a known identity. The production deploys this without irony or sentimentality, which gives the final moment its structural force: when Kohli steps through the red door and it resolves into the HSBC hexagon logo, the transformation reads as earned rather than imposed.
The red door itself functions as a consistent visual device, anchoring the brand's identity to the idea of threshold and entry — a dressing room door that becomes a banking logo is an unusual piece of brand integration, executed here with enough visual clarity that it registers even at the compressed viewing durations typical of digital and OTT placements. The campaign's multi-channel deployment across print, television, outdoor, OTT, and digital media required the core visual language to hold across formats, and the simplicity of the door-to-logo transformation serves that requirement. Production credits beyond Rahul Ghosh's creative direction are not fully documented in publicly available sources for this campaign.
No independently verified performance data, such as brand lift figures, account acquisition numbers, or media reach metrics, for the 'My Account Starts Today' campaign is publicly available at the time of writing. HSBC India and Contract Advertising have not published quantitative campaign results in the sources reviewed for this case study, which is consistent with standard practice for financial services advertising in India, where competitive sensitivity typically limits public disclosure of campaign-specific commercial outcomes.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates several properties that correlate with effectiveness in the Indian banking category. The use of Virat Kohli as brand influencer, announced by HSBC India in April 2023 as reported by campaignbriefasia.com, provides immediate salience in a market where cricket functions as a near-universal cultural touchpoint. The creative idea, built around erasure and reinvention rather than aspiration in its conventional form, differentiates the work from the achievement-montage format that dominates celebrity banking advertising in India. The multi-channel deployment across television, print, outdoor, OTT, and digital media, as documented by Exchange4media and Brand Equity, ensures the campaign reached both mass and premium audiences simultaneously, which is appropriate for a bank whose target segment spans high-net-worth and aspirationally mobile urban consumers.
The campaign's thematic coherence — a single metaphor sustained from opening frame to logo reveal — reduces the interpretive burden on viewers and strengthens recall. Clapboard assigns this campaign a score of 63 out of 100, reflecting solid strategic alignment and a committed creative concept, with room for stronger distinctiveness at the execution level relative to global benchmarks in the banking category.
'My Account Starts Today' is a 2023 HSBC India banking campaign featuring Virat Kohli. Created by Contract Advertising, it uses the metaphor of Kohli erasing his cricketing legacy to represent personal reinvention, connecting to HSBC's purpose of 'Opening up a world of opportunity' for aspirationally global Indians.
Contract Advertising created the campaign. Contract Advertising is a group company of Wunderman Thompson South Asia. The campaign's central creative idea was articulated by Rahul Ghosh, executive creative director and Mumbai creative head at Contract Advertising, as the principle that one makes history only by forgetting history.
HSBC India chose Virat Kohli to connect its global banking proposition with Indian consumers. Kohli, announced as HSBC India's brand influencer in April 2023, stated the association felt organic and natural, according to moneycontrol.com. His cross-demographic appeal in India aligned with HSBC's target of aspirationally global urban consumers.
The campaign launched in India in June 2023. Exchange4media reported on it on 5 June 2023 and Brand Equity on 6 June 2023. It ran across television, print, outdoor, OTT platforms, and digital media, ensuring reach across both mass and premium audience segments in the Indian market.
The red door in 'My Account Starts Today' functions as the film's central visual metaphor. It represents the threshold between Kohli's known cricketing identity and a new chapter. At the film's close, the door transforms into the HSBC hexagon logo, integrating the brand directly into the moment of reinvention.
Clapboard assigns 'My Account Starts Today' a score of 63 out of 100. The score reflects strong strategic alignment between HSBC's global purpose and the reinvention narrative, alongside a committed creative concept, while identifying room for stronger creative distinctiveness relative to global banking advertising benchmarks.
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