HSBC launches virtual accounts for corporate clients

Corporate and institutional clients of HSBC now can consolidate hundreds of bank accounts into a single platform for each currency that they use, the bank announced on Monday. The offering is called HSBC's Next Generation Virtual Accounts, and it reaches beyond payments to liquidity management and control of cross-border accounts. Transactions will flow through the underlying physical accounts while the bank’s Next Generation Virtual Accounts act as ledger records. The tool is one more step along HSBC's strategy to reach more corporate clients. The bank last month partnered with Australian company Identitii on a digital accounts receivable tool with the intent to simplify invoicing for corporate clients, and the bank last year reportedly began building a standalone digital banking startup for small business customers. Suraj Kalati, global head of liquidity and investments, global liquidity and cash management at HSBC, said in a statement: “Virtual accounts are a natural inter-company solution that enables everyone to focus on what they do best. Entities can focus on buying and selling, without having to manage physical bank accounts, while the corporate treasury gains greater visibility of the overall cash position and more control over their use of funds.” HSBC's virtual accounts essentially are a platform through which wholesale clients can go online to manage their own virtual account structures based on their business needs. For example, smaller companies operating as a single entity can assign virtual accounts by product line while larger firms running an in-house bank may want to group virtual accounts by entity. The bank claims the new feature will save treasury teams the operational cost of managing cash across multiple accounts and reduce the need for complex cash sweeps and pools. Available in more than 20 currencies, the new offering builds on the bank’s existing reconciliation benefits of traditional virtual accounts by enabling treasurers to centralize payments and receivables across multiple and single-entity structures, the bank said. HSBC follows other large institutions that are letting corporate clients consolidate accounts into one platform. In September 2018, Citigroup launched Citi Virtual Accounts, which similarly allows corporate clients to segregate their balances under a single physical account, providing more visibility, control and efficiencies through centralized payments, receivables and liquidity management. It initially went live with clients covering 16 markets and 37 currencies in Europe. At the time, Citi said it would expand its virtual accounts to the U.S. and Asia, but the bank did not respond before deadline to a request for an update on when that expansion might take place. The trend towards account consolidation also is being incorporated by fintech challengers. For example, TransferWise for Business is a free business account for sending and receiving multiple currencies with the real exchange rate. On sign-up, clients get their own U.K., Eurozone, Australian, New Zealand and U.S. accounts, without requiring a local address, and can send money to 70-plus countries and receive and hold 40-plus currencies. The account offers integrations with Xero's accounting tools, batch payment capabilities, open APIs for automating payments and workflows and the ability to download monthly statements for each balance held. HSBC's virtual accounts are now live in the U.K., U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore and will be available in Ireland, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates later this year. In addition to the self-management of virtual accounts, clients can receive “near real-time” reporting on transactions through HSBCnet, the bank's online commercial banking portal. The accounts also integrate with enterprise risk systems (ERS) and treasury management systems (TMS). According to Aite Group senior analyst Enrico Camerinelli, the "real value-add" of HSBC's offering is that the virtual accounts are managed not only from the bank’s e-banking portal but are made accessible to the corporate clients' own systems and applications as well. "This is what corporate users want today: to run bank applications from their own systems to have a seamless experience," he said. Camerinelli said he would not be surprised if, in the next six months, HSBC announces the creation of dedicated APIs for the purpose of enabling the creation, management and use of virtual accounts directly from the corporate ERP or TMS. HSBC said it was unable to comment on this before deadline.

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