Tradelink Electronic Commerce : hosted seminar on "Enhancing creditworthiness with import/export trade declarations data for trade finance"

In her welcome remarks, Ms. Emily Chung, Tradelink's Executive Director and Chief Operations Officer, said that Tradelink, as the leading service provider of Government Electronic Trading Services, was pleased to be able to play a role in the proof-of-concept project in making use of trade declaration data to perform credit assessments for trade finance through eTradeConnect, a blockchain-based trade finance platform developed by a bank consortium in Hong Kong under the facilitation of the HKMA.

The first guest speaker of the day, Mr. Nelson Chow, Chief Fintech Officer of the HKMA, shared the FinTech trends, initiatives undertaken by the HKMA, and latest FinTech developments, including specifically eTradeConnect, whose objectives, amongst others, are to improve trade efficiency, build better trust among trade participants, reduce risks, and facilitate trade counterparties in obtaining financing by digitizing trade documents. Following Nelson's speech was a panel discussion led by the HKMA and joined by representatives from the five participating banks. Participants discussed the challenges which the traditional trade finance business is facing and clarified the use of new technology in data privacy protection.

Going back to the main theme of the seminar, Tradelink representative explained how import/export trade declarations data could be used to facilitate trade finance. Such data, which are submitted to the Government to meet statutory requirements, provide hard evidence of a company's trade activities and can provide up-to-date information regarding its business performance. Upon customers' request, Tradelink can allow customers access to the archive and provide analysis of all declaration data for the past 7 years, which were submitted by customers to the Government through Tradelink and kept at our secure backend system.

The seminar aroused great interests of the participants as questions and comments were enthusiastically raised and discussed during the Q&A session before closing. In view of the positive feedback received and the typhoon which hit the city just one day before the seminar, in turn affecting the turn up rate of the event, Tradelink is happy to organize some more sessions on the same topic, which aim to invite our SME customers to learn more about the values that FinTech could bring.