Digital Trade Financing Service Supports Food Company Market Expansion

Besides implementing product barcodes in 2002, the company has been at the forefront of digitalization being one of the early users of GS1 Hong Kong’s ezTRADE platform. Using ezTRADE to receive orders and remittance advice electronically from various key retailers and catering customers in Hong Kong, Come In has been benefited tremendously from reduced time and resources needed, less input errors and mis-handling, streamlined payment process and an overhaul of operational efficiency.

With the economy slowly recovering from the pandemic, Come In sees a gradual resurgence of order volume from its local catering customers, which accounted for 30% of its business. The recovery of sales has prompted Come In to consider expanding its market and growing production lines to meet new demands. New machineries, workshop spaces and manpower all require new source of capital.

The recent partnership between GS1 Hong Kong and DBS Bank on “GS1 HK Digital Trade Finance Services” has caught Come In’s attention when evaluating its financing needs and available options in the market. The company decided to apply for a credit facility via “GS1 HK Digital Trade Finance Services” that leverages the ezTRADE platform. With the dedicated effort from a DBS’s account manager, the application process for bank account opening and credit facility was completed within two weeks, which is a major improvement from the standard three-month timeframe. With the expedited approval and preferential interest rates, Come In was able to quickly raise the capital with minimal fees.

Credits to the ezTRADE platform, the trusted database that stored a plethora of past and recent transaction records between a company and its trading partners – in this case the records of order and payment of Come In from Wellcome, PARKnShop, Maxim’s, YATA – accurately reflected the company’s real-time performance.

In fact, DBS had spent months to validate the trustworthiness of the platform through interviewing 20+ ezTRADE users, and the platform has been proven to be a credible source of information to facilitate its credit approval process.  The platform provide banks with trusted up-to-date trade data to offer better loan facilities and continuously monitor Come-In financial status, whilst enabling more flexible financing to the company as the amount of financing is updated on a dynamic and recurring basis.

Instead of relying on clients to provide traditional financial reports, DBS is pioneering the use of alternative data on third-party trade platform that helps streamline the process for SME financing. The bank can thus offer better interest rate, more efficient and convenient services, without sacrificing its credit underwriting principle while maintaining strong risk management standard.

The biggest advantage to Come In is a much simpler application process for bank financing. Usually, banks require plenty of documents to prepare a credit risk report, and it could be a very tedious and environmentally unsound process. Now, all these trusted electronic invoices and documents are aggregated and presented in one single platform, the company can then focus on managing its business by saving from the administrative works. Come In was also happy to maintain an account with DBS due to the waiver on handling fee for large-sum cash deposit and other value-added services it provides.

A lot of Come In’s business partners still rely on instant messaging apps, email, or fax to place orders, sometimes even in handwritten notes, which employees will have to input into the system manually. Come In encourages its catering and retail customers to fully utilise the ezTRADE platform to place orders, so that all workflows can be captured on the system automatically. This way, Come In can ensure orders are handled, reduce input error, free up manpower for other works and review its order fulfilment status at a glance. More importantly, the platform helps facilitate bank’s assessment process and more likely resulted in a higher credit limit.

Specialised in Southeast Asian food and seasoning products cross-border wholesale trading, Come In Enterprises also manages its own manufacturing plants supplying to more than 1,800 corporate clients including supermarkets, department stores, hotels and restaurants globally. Committed to driving quality and integrity over the years, the company exemplifies the pursuit of excellence like many Hong Kong brands.