Wearnes accelerates investment processes with HSBC

Headquartered in Singapore, Wearnes Starchase Limited (Wearnes) is a distributor and dealer of premium and luxury automobiles in 8 markets across Asia Pacific.

As a regional company, Wearnes maintains balances in a variety of operating currencies. Upon noticing that they had multiple surplus balances in 4 different major currencies, Wearnes looked to invest these to generate additional income streams.

While Wearnes wanted to invest these funds, they wanted to avoid products that required a lock-in period for placed funds. This was in order to optimise working capital by ensuring funds could remain readily-accessible to meet business needs.

Additionally, due to their lean treasury setup, Wearnes identified that their ideal investment solution would be one that minimised the manual effort on creating instructions for placement, monitoring and withdrawal of funds to and from suitable investment options.

With these objectives in mind, Wearnes worked with HSBC to increase yield on surplus funds through our Liquidity Investment Solutions (LIS) offering, which was enabled on their existing HSBCnet profile. Through this, Wearnes can create rules-based sweeps on HSBCnet which would automatically move surplus liquidity to and from investment accounts held with a variety of 3rd party money market fund (MMF) managers within set parameters. They are also able to dictate which MMF funds should be placed in, providing them with a high degree of choice on where and how they choose to place their funds.

These rules-based sweeps are also used to automatically redeem returns on invested funds back to the originating account once a certain values has been met. No additional paperwork is required to create deposit or withdrawal instructions. Altogether, this creates a fully-automated investment process that has allowed Wearnes to realise greater returns on surplus liquidity, with little time or cost on set-up.

As there is no lock-in period for investments placed in LIS, Wearnes can effectively place and redeem funds at their discretion. The solution also allows them to self-direct trades as needed to seize time-sensitive opportunities as they arise.

All investment reports are also received solely through HSBCnet, providing efficiency on reconciliation.

• 100% elimination of manual effort on investment saves 8 hours a month.
• Enhanced yield on surplus balances in multiple currencies across the region, to support business growth in Asia Pacific.
• Leveraging Wearnes’ existing HSBCnet profile to achieve a more efficient investment process at little to no additional cost or effort on set-up.