Unlocking opportunities for Unilever

Unilever began its operation in Bangladesh in 1964 and since then has grown into one of the leading consumer goods manufacturers in the country. To keep up with changing times, the company realised long back that technology is transforming the way an organisation behaves with its consumers and suppliers. Thus began Unilever’ journey towards digital transformation with HSBC as its core banking partner.

Unilever has embarked on a digital transformation journey to streamline its treasury connectivity, enhance visibility, and automate processes for its payment. Given their treasury is managed centrally out of Europe, the company was seeking a partner bank that possesses familiarity in each local market, and provides consistency from both connectivity and relationship coverage perspective.

To accommodate all of Unilever’s payments, a local HSBCnet profile was created along with the global host-to-host connectivity setup while parallelly enabling a SWIFTnet channel.

The company has achieved 100% straight-through-processing in making domestic payments. HSBCnet and HSBC Connect Host-to-Host Host solution gave the company the flexibility to upload electronic payment files individually or in bulk, depending on the urgency of the task, saving the management an abundance of time in the process.

Unilever has a vast array of suppliers that consists of several large firms and small-to-medium-size enterprises. Managing such a complex supply chain is very challenging, from both an operational and financial perspective.

To address these issues, we’ve introduced HSBC Supply Chain Finance (HSCF) solution to enable Unilever to effectively manage their complex supplier network. It does not only cater to the financing needs of their suppliers without the need for having credit limit or account with HSBC, but also manages their own cash flow in a more efficient manner.

HSCF, the digital platform, was introduced in 2021 as an automated solution to digitise the end-to-end process of financing the invoices of suppliers, requiring no manual intervention from the approval of the invoices to credit the proceeds to recipient’s account. Read more: https://www.business.hsbc.com.bd/en-gb/insights/innovation-and-transformation/managing-supply-chains-with-technology.

In October 2021, HSBC held a virtual roadshow for Unilever’s suppliers to highlight HSCF’s capabilities, with a focus on the successful collaboration with Unilever. With the introduction of HSCF, Unilever has better access to data while reducing manual intervention and errors at the same time.

HSBC’s financial expertise combined with its tech-driven cash management and trade solutions have made financial tasks at Unilever, such as, managing operations, treasury, suppliers and consumers, to be simpler, faster, safer and more efficient, enabling Unilever to be well on their way in their journey of digital transformation.