The challenge

The company serves about 7 million individual investors on its interactive online platform, offering a range of financial services ranging from stock trading and clearing to margin financing.

The speed of opening and funding the online trading accounts is an increasingly important investor experience as investors typically wish to immediately begin transacting in order to take advantage of market opportunities. Due to the popularity of real-time payments in Hong Kong, investors also expect that and funds they have sent to the trading accounts will be made available instantly for them to invest. However, the company found that their existing process of manual reconciliation of investor account details and manual checks performed to evidence the source of funds significantly slowed down the account opening and funding process, leading to increased costs and a poor investor experience.

The solution

HSBC launched an innovative, real-time Direct Debit solution through the use of Collection APIs. The end-to-end integration grants the company authorisation to directly debit its investors' bank accounts to setup the trading account in minutes. The automation has reduced the average waiting time for account setup from 3 days to near real-time and provides and enhanced customer experience.

Note, instant payment requires the debiting bank to participate in the HK Faster Payments scheme.

Benefits

• Better customer experience - seamless on-boarding, account opening and fund transfer for the underlying investor.
• Improved trading cycle through the ability to instantly fund the investor's accounts via real-time receipt of payments and remitter information, enabling the investor to execute their trades immediately following account setup.
• Improved reconciliation process and reduction in payment errors and rejections.
• Ease of matching remitter's account number and name in order to meet regulatory requirements on verifying third party deposits.

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