Transaction services was affected by the pandemic in two significant ways. One was on the cash management side, where there was a forced acceleration of digital initiatives and of their take-up by corporate clients. That was interesting, but by and large it was happening anyway.
The other, which was particularly important in Asia, involved trade finance, that most stubbornly paper-based activity and the only reason anyone still owns a fax machine. Trade flows, already disrupted by US-China geopolitics, were disrupted once again by Covid. It was both a painful situation and a huge opportunity: could trade finance finally be dragged into the digital world?
HSBC receives the award as Asia’s best bank for transaction services for its efforts in this area. HSBC is a comfortable leader in Asia in Euromoney’s annual trade finance survey, leading on almost every metric we evaluate including, and this might surprise some, digital.
HSBC’s trade transaction volumes, something of a proxy for Asia generally, bounced back remarkably quickly from Covid: the bank’s fourth quarter of 2020 was its best for eight quarters.