It is a critical time for Corporate Banks to invest in emerging technologies and fundamentally improve the ways they used to serve clients in order to flourish in the digital era of the 21st century. Listed below are three key trends that are shaping the innovative FinTech platform around the globe.

Trend 1: Digital Transformation of corporate banks

The traditional lending process is cumbersome and time-consuming, where the underwriting decisions cost at least 2 months. In order to improve operational efficiency, corporate banks are now undergoing digital transformation and seeking process automation. For example, paperless processing is undertaken to reduce risk and lower operating costs.

In addition, Corporate banks are using big data to anticipate and monitor possible credit losses and mitigate risk through real-time monitoring. For example, the cloud-based accounting platform like Xero or Wave can facilitate the accounting of SMEs and enable the banks to keep track of the companies’ cash flow. At the same time, Corporate banks are using Big Data to understand customer needs, build sticky customer relationships, and increase cross-selling opportunities.

Trend 2: Widespread use of Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, more Corporate Banks have used Artificial Intelligence (AL), Machine Learning (ML) and Big Data to provide frontline and back-office services, with aims to facilitate data processing and risk management. Repetitive tasks performed by human can be replaced by robotic automation programs to eliminate human errors.

For example, Citibank has partnered with HighRadius, a financial technology company specializing in cloud-based integrated receivables, to automate the cash application process powered by AI and ML. The efficiency of matching open invoices to payments received for its corporate clients is greatly enhanced. The automate process helps Citibank’s corporate clients reduce costs and optimize working capital.

Trend 3: New lending models
Traditionally, small businesses can hardly get loans from banks unless they have good credit. However, the cost is relatively high for small businesses given banks apply the same loaning procedure to different corporates regardless of their scale.

Thanks to the existing Open Banking Initiative regulations, such as the European Union payment services directive (PSD2), the traditional loan process is gradually challenged by the emerging enterprise loan platforms. With the increasingly facilitated data-sharing, the Fintech platforms can use the collected data to further determine the creditworthiness of enterprises. For example, the Lending Club in the United States started lending in 2006 and now there are more than 200 different Lending platforms in US. Amazon, the largest  e-commerce company in the United States, provides financing for its merchants from US$1,000 to $750,000 and has lent $3 billion on aggregate since 2011 to assist many SMEs.

A successful example of the FinTech revolution

An instant noodle would cost you 3 three minutes to meet your satisfaction, so as the MYBank, where this China’s virtual bank only takes 3 minutes to deal with the loan application process from micro-enterprises. It has totally disrupted the traditional loading process in China.

MYBank was founded by e-commerce giant Alibaba and Internet giant Tencent Holdings in June 2015. As a product of the FinTech revolution, MYBank fully demonstrates the above three trends – Digitalisation , Artificial Intelligence, and new Lending Models.

MYbank describes its loan process “3-1-0”, which means that it only takes 3 minutes for clients to apply loan while Artificial Intelligence approves it in 1 second with 0 staff required during the process.

According to FinTechnewsHK, MYBank has used real-time data and a risk-management system that can analyze more than 3,000 variables. Until August 2019, MYBank has provided nearly 3 trillion yuan (US$290 billion) to 1,700 micro-enterprises, where 80% of them had never loaned from banks.

The Corporate Lending model of SMEs has been gradually changed from bank to technology driven. It raises the question then: how can Hong Kong, the well-known international financial center, take advantage of new technology to help enhance the credit capacity of its as many as 340 thousand local enterprises? Many parties do play a role. Banking industries should embrace the digital transformation; Technology companies can work collectively to break through the traditional framework; The regulatory authority can proactively carry out more reform for the open banking environment.

FinMonster, as a pioneer in Corporate Banking fintech, has already launched the Corporate Loan Comparison Platform and been preaching the building up of a Regional Corporate Financing Platform for the promotion of capital flow to real enterprises and simplification of the loan process which ultimately benefit the business growth of enterprises. We are working towards the financial technology transformation. Will you join us?