HSBC Collaborates With HKTVmall To Get Digital Trade Finance To Merchants

Recently, with an agenda to facilitate trade finance services to e-commerce merchants’, HSBC has joined forces with HKTVmall, a Hong Kong-based online shopping and entertainment platform.

The initiated collaboration by HSBC will allow HKTVmall’s merchants who are engaged in the operations of selling electronic appliances, fashion & consumer goods to get instant finance without any requirements of submitting collateral or financial documents to the lenders.

For this purpose, HSBC will conduct a thorough check of the vendor’s data from HKTVmall so that it could examine and predict their credit performance. It includes turnover and refund records of several types of goods etc.

Terence Chiu, head of commercial banking, Hong Kong at HSBC says, “We are glad to collaborate with HKTVmall to aid online merchants by figuring out productive ways of using the information to make the process of loan approval easier.” He further added, “This partnership assures to bring innovation in the way that huge information can transform client’s lives into simpler and contribute to digital transformation for Hong Kong’s business community. ”

This recent partnership is followed by last year’s partnership of HSBC with Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao Network Technology where the HongKong vendors on the Alibaba-owned TMall Global e-marketplace were enabled to apply for fundraising of up to US$500,000, which was the bank’s “first trade finance solution to consider real-time third party information for getting a loan approved.” according to an HSBC spokesperson.

However, the main area of difference is the use of the recently launched Commercial Data Interchange (CDI) by HSBC-HKTVmall partnership.

Disclosed at the past year’s Hong Kong Fintech Week virtual conference in November, the CDI is the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s (HKMA) engaged in open banking operations. CDI was established as the data clearinghouse which allows information flow from clients and third-party data sources to banks, which can be used as a part of a substitute credit scoring strategy.

Alice Wong, group chief financial officer at HKTV says, “This collaboration demonstrates how to convert real e-commerce operational information into a credit evaluation and checking instrument to make commercial financing acute and more effective.”

Up until this point, the plan is yet to go completely live but HSBC explains it has already enlarged a pilot trade loan to Cleanic and household Cleaning Equipment along with the tools company, depending on turnover information provided by HKTVmall.

Apart from this, HSBC has also announced a $48 million green trade finance facility to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the UAE based project services company Lamprell.

The bank now has strategies to provide the program to all HKTVmall merchants later this year.