HSBC has recently announced that it has closed the first receivables financing deal on Singapore’s Networked Trade Platform (NTP), setting the foundations for SMEs to access funding in as quick as 15 minutes, down from a day traditionally.
The NTP, launched by the government in 2018, is a platform which digitises paperwork to make government certification and third-party commercial services simpler.
HSBC’s launch of the Receivables Finance programme on the NTP comes after the completion of a receivables financing transaction with Singapore-based SME, Exceltec Property Management, which is a property and facilities management company.
According to the bank, this latest development will allow SMEs to access and utilise receivables financing via the platform, all the while streamlining and ironing out the complexities and manual processes required for SMEs to obtain and support their cashflow needs. The launch occurs in tandem with the bank’s strategy to scale up its SME business in Singapore.
HSBC business banking customers who are signed up to NTP via its value-added service, vCargoCloud (VCC) CamelONE Trade Finance, will now be able to send receivables finance transactions directly to HSBC using CorpPass as a single-sign on, the lender said. This offers SMEs with a much higher level of convenience, allowing them to reach out to multiple banks through a single interface.
Benefits of HSBC’s Receivables Finance programme include the widened use of the CamelONE Trade Finance portal on NTP, streamlined submissions and quicker access to finance, the lender said.
Receivables finance is a tool typically used by SMEs to obtain short-term finance based on issued invoices.
Historically, receivable finance submissions were tedious, often creating its own barriers to entry for SMEs. This was due to such submissions requiring a significant manual transfer of data, which can cost a company a lot of time, as well as potentially incurring costly errors.
“CamelONE Trade Finance is the latest platform for our customers to manage banking with HSBC digitally. Using application programming interfaces (APIs), HSBC can now process customer’s digital transactions through CamelONE Trade Finance with no human intervention,” HSBC said.
The digitisation of these processes have resulted in the submission process being cut down to just 15 minutes, compared to a full day previously.
“SMEs are the lifeblood of Singapore’s economy and they are also the businesses that are working on such tight operational margins. We’ve worked closely with NTP and VCC to integrate end-to-end API technology which will significantly expedite the financing process, a key determiner of operational continuity for SMEs who rely on the availability of immediate cash flow,” said Iain Morrison, head of global trade and receivables finance at HSBC Singapore.
