Impact of Global Centralization: Streamlined management of payments

As a FTSE 100 constituent, our Client promotes greater financial health and consumer opportunity by helping its clients understand, manage and protect their personal information. Their services provides millions of individuals with secure, online access to their credit history and score, empowering them to manage and improve their financial status, shielding themselves against fraud and identity theft.

Our Client established a Global Shared Services Centre (GSSC) in Malaysia in 2011. The GSSC now manages end-to-end transactional processes of banking activities, supporting its Asia-Pacific and EMEA regions with pipeline plans to support its Latin American-based operations.

The selection of Malaysia as our Client’s location to centralize its operations is attributed to its ability to support both a sustainable and low-cost structure. The multifactorial decision was made on the foundations of encouraging advisory by the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) – Malaysia’s lead digital economy driver. In addition, critical factors included: our Client’s established Kuala Lumpur-based development centres, and a readily available skilled workforce which elevated the confidence of our Client in realizing its GSSC ambitions in Malaysia. This initiative, a tangible extension to our Client’s expanding ASEAN footprint, was a continuation of the build-out and consolidation of its GSSC infrastructure. The combination of factors including the need for operational standardisation and room for scalability addressed our Client’s concerns. In addition, Malaysia, a specialist centre for the know-how of the setup of GSSCs with well-equipped technology and infrastructure, met our Client’s needs. These collective elements culminated in the strategic establishment of its GSSC in Cyberjaya – Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor, the nation’s aspiring Silicon Valley.

Besides being at the heart of the MSC, other considerations when selecting Cyberjaya included the relatively economical floor space to real estate price ratio when compared with the central business district of Kuala Lumpur.

As a business services provider of repute, our client seeks to establish itself as a centralized Centre of Excellence (CoE) in support of its global processing activities, achieving a high-level of efficiency. This includes the increase governance and control via a streamlined Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). Retention of growing talent by maximizing the use of available resources with the scalability of the business is a strategic initiative our Client employs. The leveraging on industrial expertise ensures our Client’s position at the forefront of the industry by being first movers. These collective efforts induces the promotion of scalability and flexibility in an effort to maximise its efficiency as a function of time and cost.

Our Client’s primary concern was the streamlining of its payments process. Their far-reaching operations meant it required a financial services provider matching its global footprint. Consequently, our Client consulted its longstanding UK-based financial services provider – HSBC. The Global Payments Solutions Team at HSBC was quick in addressing the needs of our Client with the proposal of a centralized payments process across its extensive global network in a single location – Malaysia. As its core bank, it was a privilege for HSBC to tailor and execute a fit-for-purpose solution. The direct connectivity will lead to the efficient and streamlined payments process through a core financial institution.

A direct link between our Client’s ERP and HSBC’s back-end system was initiated through the host-to-host connectivity for straight-through processing of payment instructions, feeding back the electronic bank statement¹ and file² status activity report.

This designed structure lends creativity³ to our Client’s solutions, product innovation, and flexibility; enabling the tapping of established infrastructure between our Client’s operations in the UK and HSBC. The unique complexities provided HSBC Malaysia the opportunity to collaborate in a global and regional capacity, capitalising on collective expertise⁴ with a sustainable precision-led focus for an innovative solution to meet our Client’s needs. This coverage extends to its Asia-Pacific and EMEA operations. Streamlining is required for the complexities of infrastructure, setup and cross-border operations between its Center of Excellence (CoE) team, HSBCnet profile, and host-to-host connectivity with its operations in Malaysia, Singapore and the UK.

HSBC’s astute solution along with creative product innovation translated into tangible time and cost savings, supplementing the augmented governance in the implementation of a single host-to-host connectivity, linking HSBC and our Client’s global operations. The extensive migration process involved various global systems. HSBC’s proven implementation methodology⁵ effectively managed the seamless transition of our FTSE 100 Client.

HSBC satisfactorily delivered all our Client objectives: the centralization of our Client’s global operations resulted in significant cost reduction, increased efficiency and improved governance.