HSBC has successfully partnered with Agile Property (Agile) to provide a tailor-made digital payment solution for their Housing Development Account (HDA). This new digital solution significantly reduces manual processes and digitalises the HDA payables process making HSBC the first bank in Malaysia to offer such a solution for Malaysia’s real estate sector.
For property developers in Malaysia, HDAs are mandatory for all residential developments to safeguard the interest of residential buyers. The developer will channel all payments received from buyers of a residential property into a specific HDA. The payments from the HDA will then be used to pay for items such as quit rent, assessment rates, levy charges, stamp duty, insurance premiums, consultant fees, and costs of construction.
“The on-going Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt many established processes for businesses and corporates alike. Agile faced challenges in making its business-as-usual payments and to keep their operations running smoothly. We understood Agile’s requirements and partnered with them to implement an eHDA (Electronic Housing Development Account) payment solution for the client,” said Karel Doshi, Country Head of Corporate, HSBC Malaysia.
The eHDA solution, a first-of-its-kind solution in Malaysia, helped Agile migrate and eliminate all manual HDA payments to an online platform. This has allowed Agile to execute payments electronically by utilising electronic transfers, significantly reducing paper-based payments and increase operational efficiencies.
“This eHDA solution has been ideal for us at Agile. The solution has not only allowed us to reduce our paper-based payments and made transactions faster and simpler, but it is also more costeffective for us. As a multinational company, our internal payment approval involves multiple signatories across different countries and with the eHDA solution, we no longer need to forward any physical documents to China for authorised signers to approve payments and sign the instructions,” said Grace Zhao, Finance Director of Agile Property Overseas.
“This solution has been helpful in reducing logistics lead time and very much of risk of loss during transit. The solution will undoubtedly lay out a strong foundation and continuous growth in faith for our future co-operation with HSBC in Malaysia. We are delighted and impressed with HSBC for not only understanding our needs but also working together to implement this new eHDA solution for us very quickly. We look forward to continuing this partnership with HSBC to innovate new solutions and add value to our exisiting products and systems.”
“Investing in digital technology solutions and infrastructure has always been a priority for HSBC. We are happy to partner with businesses to customise a solution that tackles a known problem in the real estate sector that is unique to Malaysia. HSBC remains committed in supporting and enabling businesses to bank smarter and gain operational and financial efficiencies to become faster, simpler, and more connected than ever,” added Karel.
“The conceptualisation of this eHDA proposition is a further testament to our market-leading and client-centric solutions, which have won many recent accolades. In times like this, banks must be doing their part to impart knowledge, bridge connections, co-create with partners and all for the benefit of clients, communities and the economy,” said Shayan Hazir, Head of Global Liquidity and Cash Management, HSBC Malaysia.
“The pandemic has created a digital dependency where we need to harness technology in our digital platform to create powerful customer experiences. We continue to invest our resources in making banking seamless, efficient yet compliant. We are delighted to partner with Agile in digitising their business and creating an innovative solution which will ultimately benefit the real estate sector,” he concluded.
For more than 130 years, HSBC has played an important role in supporting companies in Malaysia; connecting them to business opportunities and enabling them to thrive in the domestic market as well as the wider ASEAN region and beyond. HSBC Malaysia recently won the Asset Triple A ‘Best Payments and Collections Solution’ Award and ‘Best Cash Management Service Provider’ Award for Malaysia. Globally, HSBC was also recognised by Euromoney as the World’s Best Bank for Transaction Services. These achievements are indeed a testament to HSBC leading the way in financial technology and digital innovation.