Much ado about nothing I'm afraid. The rewards have been slightly improved, though taking into account the fact that they've withdrawn the 25% bonus points after $10k for 2013, I'm not sure it's much of an improvement at all. The insurance doesn't seem to have changed any. That they've maintained a 2.5% forex fee when other Canadian cards have slowly begun doing away with that is disappointing. The ability to transfer points to SQ, BA and CX is a nice perk, but the fact that these transfers are not at 1:1 (BA is 10k points to 8k miles; SQ and CX are 10k points to 9k miles) makes HSBC look cheap. At least there's no annual fee.