HSBC seems worse than many others. When I moved to Canada my immigration lawyer explicitly advised to stay away from HSBC, this was in 2000 or so and they already had a pretty bad rep. The various scandals since then haven't improved that reputation. TD, CT and RB have their own problems but none of them have received even close to the total fines that HSBC has (to the best of my knowledge).
I agree there are no good guys here, but there are shades.
I've been using HSBC in Canada and the USA for 15 years, they're great for exactly the reasons they shouldn't be. Their tooling basically lets you do whatever you want with no oversight. It's kinda weird, but I liked it. Sad they sold their Canadian business to RBC (even though they sold their USA business to Citizen Bank, they allowed high net worths to stay but the Canadian arm did not, wondering if this news is the reason for their exit)
I can give you one: one guy I met while I lived in Canada had a scheme going where they got people to sign up for a service using a credit card and then they also signed them up for a bunch of unrelated very low monthly fee services that automatically renewed and/or unrelated one time charges marked as 'donation to some charity'. HSBC was happy to shield the company from VISA and MC for the longest time because they made money on it. This was pretty much a clear case of theft and without HSBC cooperating I really doubt it would have worked.
I agree there are no good guys here, but there are shades.