HSBC has partnered with HKTVmall, a Hong Kong-based online shopping and entertainment platform, to provide a new digital trade finance solution to e-commerce sellers.
The collaboration will enable HKTVmall’s vendors, which include electronic appliance sellers, fashion retailers, and consumer goods providers, to access finance without having to provide collateral or financial documents.
Instead, HSBC will use merchant data from HKTVmall, including turnover and refund records of different types of goods, to analyse and forecast vendors’ credit performance.
“We are pleased to join hands with HKTVmall to support online merchants by pioneering new ways of using data to simplify the loan approval processes,” says Terence Chiu, head of commercial banking, Hong Kong at HSBC. “This partnership promises to drive innovation in the way that big data can make customers’ lives easier and support digital transformation for Hong Kong’s business community.”
Fintech company Trade Ledger has raised £13.5mn in series A funding. The round was led by Point72 Ventures, a venture capital firm, with participation from Foundation Capital, Hambro Perks and Court Lorenzini, the founder of DocuSign. Other existing investors were also involved. Established in 2016 by CEO Martin McCann, Trade Ledger’s corporate banking platform supports .
Dialogue Exchange, a UK-based independent credit and political risk insurance platform, has created a set of free, open common standards for single credit risk insurance, as part of wider efforts to bring the market into the digital age.
Launched today, the single risk credit data standard sets out unified terms for field names, counterparty industries and cover required for structured credit transactions across a number of deal types. The aim, Dialogue CEO Ben Heaney tells
GTR, is to reduce ambiguity and duplication, so that industry stakeholders can easily exchange and use data for their own needs regardless of how it was created or collected.
Weitzel announced he was
leaving his role as cluster lead of trade finance at the bank to join Surecomp, a provider of trade finance systems to banks and corporates, at the end of last year.
Motel has held various senior roles during his 11 years at Commerzbank. Before his new appointment, effective February 1, he was country CEO Asean, based in Singapore. He also previously worked as head of financial institutions at the bank.
Prior to joining Commerzbank, Motel was head of relationship management for financial institutions at LBBW.
In his new Frankfurt-based role, Motel is responsible for the development and digitalisation of the bank’s trade finance products.
A managing partner and chief investment officer of New York-based trade finance lender International Investment Group (IIG) has pleaded guilty for his part in a Ponzi-like scheme to defraud funds and investors.
According to a release from the US Department of Justice (DoJ), IIG co-founder David Hu accepted that over the course of more than a decade, he defrauded IIG funds and investors out of more than US$100mn by, “among other fraudulent actions, creating fictitious investments and overvaluing investments used to generate funds,” which were used to pay off earlier investors.
“Hu mismarked millions of dollars of loan assets, falsified paperwork to create fake loans, sold overvalued and fake loans and used the proceeds from those sales to pay off earlier investors, and falsified paperwork to deceive auditors and avoid scrutiny. He now faces a serious term of imprisonment,” says Audrey Strauss, United States attorney for the southern district of New York.