Hong Kong fintech startup Qupital will offer services to eBay cross-border sellers

Catherine Shu
Updated ·2 min read

Qupital, a trade financing platform, said today that it has entered an agreement with eBay to be one of its officially recommended Hong Kong financing service providers. Qupital will provide offshore financing services, including working capital, to eBay sellers in China and Hong Kong through QiaoYiDai, its main product.

Founded in 2016 and based in Hong Kong, Qupital raised a $15 million Series A last year led by strategic investor CreditEase FinTech Investment Fund, with participation from Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund and MindWorks Ventures.

According to Qupital, it will now be able to "obtain real-time data authorized by eBay sellers through API channels to maximize the value of the sellers' operational data for credit control purposes. It adds that "this enables the company to facilitate a fully online application experience, a credit assessment process completed on average within three working days and all drawdown requests to be settled within 24 hours."

Qupital is one of a growing roster of fintech companies in Asia — Aspire and First Circle are a couple of other examples — that provide loans, credit lines and services to online sellers, SMBs and other businesses that often have trouble obtaining working capital from traditional lenders like banks.

Instead of relying on financial statements, these companies use data analytics to assess creditworthiness. In QiaoYiDai’s case, this means looking at "e-commerce statistics and big data, including the credibility of [applicants’] online shops, historical transaction data, rating data, refund and exchange rates of goods, among a plethora of other data points," Qupital said in its announcement.

On average, QiaoYiDai provides an average credit limit of $150,000, with a maximum credit line of up to $1.5 million for qualifying sellers.

More e-commerce vendors in China are turning to social media as their main channels for reaching buyers (for example, Alibaba has partnerships with Weibo and Douyin and rival JD.com recently struck a strategic partnership with Kuaishou, while TikTok began testing social commerce last year), and having quick, integrated access to financing tools may convince vendors to stick with legacy e-commerce platforms like eBay, especially for cross-border sellers.