Hong Kong Relaxes Rules In Effort To Boost FinTech Lending

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority has, as finews.asia reported this past week, amended its credit risk management guidelines in a way that seeks to boost the embrace of analytics when lending to smaller firms.

The site reported that as part of the authority’s “Banking Made Easy” program, lenders are now allowed to use big data analysis to examine and approve credit applications. The original guidelines, as reported, had limited at least some types of lending — to 10 percent an authorized institution’s capital bases — but the more recent actions from the HKMA seek to “liberalize” lending activities.  Moving ahead, authorized institutions are able to set limits of their own when it comes to FinTech driven decisions aided by technology.

As reported, the Banking Made Easy Initiative traces its genesis to last year and had sought in part to minimize “regulatory frictions” encountered in onboarding and online finance activities.

Elsewhere in Hong Kong, in terms of individual company news, Rapyd, a FinTech as a service startup, said it has linked with Hong Kong’s TNG FinTech to expand cashless transactions.

As announced by the firms, the TNG Wallet will be added to several other e-wallets that stand among the payment options on offer from Rapyd.

This means, according to a release, that Rapyd’s clients will be able to accept payments from the TNG e-wallet users, even if those customers opt not to use a credit or debit card while transacting online.

The Rapyd platform uses application programming interface (API) services to automate back end functions such as collection, FX and identity verification.

“Hong Kong is an incredibly vibrant small business market, and we are giving large regional enterprises as well as local merchants opportunities to increase their revenue by enabling them to accept the locally-preferred payment methods used by consumers from anywhere around the world,” Joel Yarbrough, Rapyd’s vice president for Asia Pacific, said in the release detailing the partnership.

Separately, in news from Australia, Cashwerkz said it had debuted a new serverless platform architecture that will help the company scale its “API as a product” strategy. The company said in a release this week that cementing new banking partnerships will help meet new financial services needs in the post Open Banking era. The company has said that the new architecture can help companies speed time to market with new features tied to, among other offerings, cash management. Cash invested on the platform, said the company, stands at $2.7 billion as of June 30 of this year and as measured since the August 2017 launch.

Open Banking Partnerships – Focus On Romania

In other announcements, Allevo, a financial software provider, and WSO2, an open-source integration vendor, said they have linked in a partnership where Allevo will serve as a WSO2 consultative integration partner.

The two companies said they will collaborate to deliver open banking solutions to meet the needs of third-party financial service providers in Romania.

“The solution ensures compliance with the second payment services directive (PSD2). It also enables the bank to centrally manage requests coming from third-party providers on behalf of their customers and then send proxy responses back to them,” according to the release.