Hang Seng Bank Takes Home Two Accolades at HKB Technology Excellence Awards

Its initiatives to serve customers has earned a double dose of recognition.

Hang Seng received the ‘Enterprise Software – Banking’ award for its Hang Seng Corporate API Solutions and the ‘E-Commerce – Banking’ for its Foreign Exchange Order Watch platform at the recently concluded HKB Technology Excellence Awards, organised by Hong Kong Business magazine.

Now in its second year, HKB Technology Excellence Awards honours enterprises that lead the charge in developing groundbreaking projects, digital services, reimagined strategies, and technological initiatives. Winners were judged on the basis of uniqueness and innovation, effectiveness and impact, and dynamism.

The Hang Seng Corporate API solution is a real-time payment collection solution that facilitates advanced system connections between a customer’s Enterprise Resource Planning system and Hang Seng’s back-end system. Its launch was the first corporate API solution providing fully automated 24x7 real-time payment collection for commercial banking customers. Operating as a new channel, the solution supports improved cash management and includes a real-time Direct Debit Instruction (DDI) service.

Hang Seng Corporate API Solutions includes two separate APIs—DDI API and Status Enquiry API—and is designed to support and enhance the end-to-end flow of DDI services. To safeguard the security of transactions and activity, the channel employs two-factor authentication, requiring the use of a User ID plus Password and digital signature.

Futu Securities International (HK) Ltd (FUTU) is using the Hang Seng Corporate API solution. With a mission to redefine the traditional investing experience, FUTU was looking for a fully automated solution for their customers to be able to trade anytime, anywhere in a secure manner.

FUTU not only expressed gratitude for Hang Seng’s extraordinary service in helping them to enhance the efficiency of their securities trading top-up service while still upholding the necessary high standards of transaction accuracy, but also for the professionalism and sincerity exhibited by the bank’s relationship management team and sales team.

Through its adoption of the Hang Seng Corporate API solution, FUTU became the first securities company in Hong Kong to be able to offer around-the-clock automated payment collection, setting a new service benchmark for other securities firms in Hong Kong.

Traditional payment collection processes such as ATM transfer, counter bank-in and online banking transfer typically have a turnaround time of at least two hours. Hang Seng’s automated solution takes just two seconds and is completed without any manual intervention by FUTU or Hang Seng’s staff.

Meanwhile, Hang Seng’s Foreign Exchange Order Watch (FXOW) is an innovative platform that helps customers capture beneficial currency conversion opportunities quickly and easily in fast-moving financial markets. FXOW provides 24-hour real-time cross-currency monitoring and the ability to set-up automatic currency conversion instructions between pairs of nine different major currencies.

Customers can pre-set their target exchange rate for pairs of different currencies and the amount to be converted. The monitoring period for each instruction can be as long as 90 days. When the target rate is reached, the specified currency amount and type will be immediately exchanged into the target currency and the customer will simultaneously receive a ‘target match’ alert to inform them that the transaction has been completed. FXOW also gives customers the ability to request real-time rate alerts through a variety of notification channels.

The HKB Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Hong Kong Business, was held via video conferencing throughout the month of September.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Gilles Alexandre Salansy, Partner, Accounting and Outsourcing at Mazars Hong Kong; Jason Yau, Partner, Technology and Management Consulting at RSM Hong Kong; Douglas Kwan, Partner, Assurance and Advisory Services at SHINEWING (HK) CPA Limited; Steve Lo, Partner and Asia-Pacific Chief Innovation Officer at Ernst & Young; and Loretta Fong, Partner and Telecommunications Leader at PwC Hong Kong.

If you would like to join the 2021 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technological innovations, please email Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected]