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Industry solution · Import & export

Crypto Compliance for Hong Kong Trading Companies

Your buyers already want to pay in stablecoin and your bank already wants to know where the money came from. Screen the funds before they move, and hand your bank a file that answers the question in one attachment.

For Hong Kong-registered trading companies. Not tax, legal or accounting advice.

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What this usually looks like

  • The correspondent chain eats the margin

    A wire to a supplier crosses two or three correspondent banks, each taking a cut you never see itemised. The FX spread is quoted as "the rate", and on a six-figure invoice the difference between that rate and the mid-market one is larger than your net margin on the order.

  • The source-of-funds letter

    A USDT settlement lands, and three weeks later the relationship manager asks you to evidence where it came from. You have a hash and a WhatsApp thread. The deadline is measured in days.

  • Nobody wants to go first

    Your buyer will not pay before shipment and you will not ship before payment. Their bank cannot open a letter of credit into your corridor, so the deal stalls on trust rather than on price.

  • The auditor asks what the hash is

    At year end a transaction ID has no counterparty, no contract, no invoice, no rate and no stated purpose. Reconstructing it from memory is the expensive part of the audit.

Stop Losing 1.5–2% of Every Invoice to SWIFT FX Spreads

The cost of an international wire is rarely the wire fee. It is the exchange rate, and the reason it is hard to argue with is that it never appears as a line item — the bank quotes a rate, the rate already contains the margin, and the invoice reconciles to the cent. On a USD 100,000 order, a spread of 1.5–2% against the mid-market rate is $1,500 to $2,000 that left the business without ever being priced.

Add the correspondent fees each intermediary bank deducts in transit, and the amount that arrives is smaller than the amount that was sent by a margin nobody agreed to in advance. Then add the three to ten business days the transfer spends in the network, during which the goods are not moving and the working capital is neither in your account nor in your supplier’s.

A wallet-to-wallet stablecoin settlement changes the shape of that cost rather than eliminating it. The transfer itself costs network gas — tens of dollars, not thousands — and clears in minutes. What replaces the spread is the cost of converting at each end, which is a price you can see and negotiate rather than one embedded in a quote. The honest comparison is not "free versus 2%": it is a visible cost you control against an invisible one you do not.

The reason most trading companies have not made the switch is not the settlement. It is everything that happens after it, which is the rest of this page.

$1,500–2,000

Typical FX spread cost on a USD 100,000 invoice

Illustrative, based on typical bank FX spreads of 1.5–2% against the mid-market rate. Your actual spread depends on your bank, your corridor and your volume. Not tax, legal or accounting advice.

See the full cost comparison, line by line

Protect Your Primary HK Bank Account from AML Freezes

A Hong Kong bank does not review an inbound transfer because it is crypto-related. It reviews it because it cannot see a trade. An on-chain transfer arrives carrying no counterparty identity, no contract, no invoice number and no stated purpose — which is the profile its monitoring is built to escalate, whatever the asset.

The fix is sequence, not volume of paperwork. Screen the counterparty wallet while declining is still an option, and bind the invoice, the contract and the transaction hash together at the moment the transfer happens, when all three already exist. Do that and the source-of-funds request stops being a research project and becomes an attachment.

Your operating account is the single point of failure in a trading business. Losing it does not slow the company down; it stops it, and a Hong Kong entity that has had an account closed for AML reasons does not find the next one easily. That asymmetry is the whole argument for doing this before rather than after.

How a settlement runs

Buyer wallet
Your customer’s wallet address, before anything moves.
Pre-transfer KYT screening
Sanctions and risk exposure checked by third-party blockchain analytics while you can still decline.
Direct wallet transfer
Funds move from their wallet to yours. No LiLianMao wallet in the path.
Automated evidence pack
Invoice, contract, screening result and on-chain proof, bound into one file.

Automated Bank Evidence Packs for Trade Audits

The evidence pack is assembled as the trade happens rather than reconstructed afterwards. It links the commercial documents you already produce — the invoice, the contract or purchase order, the shipping reference — to the screening result and the on-chain transaction, so a reviewer can follow one thread from the goods to the settlement without asking you a follow-up.

That is what makes it useful to two different readers. A relationship manager handling a source-of-funds request wants to see that a real trade sits behind the inflow. An auditor at year end wants the same trail with the rate and the purpose attached. Both get a file rather than a conversation.

  • Invoice, contract and on-chain proof in one document
  • Screening result and timestamp recorded against the transfer
  • Exportable for your bank, your auditor and your own records

Settle $100k Invoices in Hours, Not Weeks

The on-chain leg of a stablecoin settlement clears in minutes and costs network gas measured in tens of dollars, regardless of the invoice size. There is no correspondent chain to traverse and no cut-off time to miss, which is why a Friday afternoon payment is not a Tuesday morning problem.

Being straight about the rest: what you experience end to end includes your own conversion and your own bank crediting the fiat, and neither is under our control or ours to promise. The claim worth making is narrower and still large — the leg that used to take three to ten business days now takes minutes, and the part that remains is the part you were already doing.

  • On-chain settlement in minutes, at any invoice size
  • Network gas in tens of dollars, not a percentage of the transfer
  • No correspondent chain, no cut-off times, no weekend gap

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you hold or convert our funds at any point?

No. There is no LiLianMao wallet in the payment path and we hold no keys. Funds move directly from your customer’s wallet to yours, and we never receive, hold, convert or transmit them. We are analytics and documentation software sitting beside the transfer, not a party to it.

Will this stop our HSBC or DBS account being frozen?

No service can guarantee any bank’s decision, and you should treat anyone who says otherwise with suspicion. Screening is provided by third-party blockchain analytics vendors and is indicative, not determinative. What changes is what you can produce when asked: a screened counterparty, a documented purpose and a file linking the invoice, the contract and the transaction. That is the part within anyone’s control, and it is what is usually missing.

Our buyers pay in USDT on Tron. Which chains and assets do you support?

Tron (TRC-20), Ethereum (ERC-20), BNB Chain, Solana, Arbitrum and Polygon, covering USDT, USDC, BTC and ETH. TRC-20 USDT is the most common rail in the corridors our users trade in, which is why it is first on that list rather than last.

We already have a compliance consultant. Where does this fit?

Alongside them, not instead of them. A consultant sets your policy and handles the judgement calls; this produces the evidence that policy depends on, on every transfer, without anyone remembering to. Most firms find the consultant’s time moves from assembling files to reviewing the ones that screening flagged.

What happens if a screening result comes back with a problem?

You find out before the funds move, which is the entire point of the sequence. The result tells you what the exposure is — a sanctions match, or risk inherited from wallets upstream in the transaction history — and the decision to accept, ask more questions or decline is yours. Screening is indicative and not a verdict; it is the information you would otherwise have received from your bank, weeks later, framed as a problem.

Protect Your Hong Kong Bank Account Before Funds Move

We are onboarding a small founding group of trading companies — firms already accepting crypto and already uneasy about it. Four questions is all it takes, and we reply personally.

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Non-custodial software service. Screening is indicative, not determinative. No service can guarantee a bank’s decision.