All big banks say they are leaders in transaction services, few really are. HSBC is always in contention for this award and takes the honours after a year full of new services and innovation.
HSBC’s global payments solutions business facilitated $1.365 trillion in payments and receivables. Again, it was the largest corporate card issuer in the region – it processed 2.7 million commercial cards – with volumes up 53% on an annualized basis.
On the trade side, it processed $71 billion worth of transactions, of which $22.8 billion involved burgeoning intra-regional trade. It processed 192,000 trade finance transactions during the course of 2022, of which 73,000 were intra-regional, up 14% year on year.
At the end of the year, its global payments solutions (GPS) business, which provides a full roster of services for financial and non-financial corporates in markets from Algeria to Qatar, had deposits of $21.3 billion. Last year it implemented more than 1,500 GPS deals in the Middle East, north Africa and Turkey, more than 600 of which were for new clients. It processed 18.7 million transactions in 2022, up 28% year on year, of which 11 million were domestic.
Much of this growth, HSBC reckons, is due to customer acquisition in markets such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia. HSBC’s long-standing presence in Riyadh – including its 31% stake in Saudi Awwal Bank, which has around 23,000 corporate customers and a wholesale deposit base of $23 billion – is key to its future in the region. Saudi conglomerates are busy diversifying, spinning off assets and investing in assets across the world.
The bank continues to introduce innovative services and solutions. For example, clients in Qatar can now make and settle tax payments seamlessly and in real time, thanks to the integration of HSBCnet, its online banking platform, with the local tax authorities. In the United Arab Emirates, it is helping clients, such as nitrogen fertilizer producer Fertiglobe, free up working capital by centralizing cash from other banks on a daily basis.
For us it’s … about looking at what each client needs on a holistic basis in markets across the region
Kyle Boag
In another first in the region, HSBC introduced a scheme that lets clients in the UAE generate virtual cards to complete business-to-business payments. Another new service lets customers in Bahrain, Kuwait and the UAE request a notification when making a cross-border payment. That helps them make smarter FX choices and saves them money. And a new digital receivables portal, launched in the UAE last year, cuts waiting time for access to corporate capital for clients to less than 48 hours, from 60 days.
“We deliver to corporates all the way from business banking up to the largest global institutions; HSBC offers a complete banking package to our clients across the region,” says Kyle Boag, regional head of global payments solutions, Middle East, north Africa and Turkey, at HSBC. “For us it’s not only about trade finance or cash management – it’s about looking at what each client needs on a holistic basis in markets across the region.”
Transaction services are the nuts and bolts of banking. HSBC’s ability to create a direct payments solution for Uber in Egypt, enabling it to process more than 100,000 transactions a month, including 52% of drivers’ weekly payments, and a new and streamlined treasury function for Kuwait’s Jazeera Airways, helping it to improve cash visibility and deliver a liquidity management dashboard, is proof of this.
