Hong Kong Credit Insight 4: Credit Management Without Speaking Chinese?

Would a Westerner who do not speak any Cantonese (the most popular Chinese dialect spoken in Hong Kong) lives well in Hong Kong? How about practicing credit management without knowing Chinese?

The official languages in Hong Kong are English and Chinese. Regarding spoken Chinese, most Hong Kong people speak Cantonese together with other dialects like Shanghainese, etc.

Mandarin (also known as Putonghua, the China official spoken language) is getting popular because of the influx of Mainland visitors.

Chinese texts are written in Traditional Chinese with a minority of Simplified Chinese. One may regard them as different fonts for the same language. Traditional Chinese is the official written Chinese in Hong Kong.

However, to live a local life, such as eating in a local restaurant, Chinese is often the language being used.

The good news is all of the correspondences from the Government or big companies (such as banks) are always written in both English and Chinese.

The credit management practice contains the qualitative part as well as the quantitative part. The quantitative analysis involves analytics and probabilities that are language independent. However, the qualitative analysis is better to have the help of local language skill because it involves a lot of reading of local information.

With the absence of Chinese skill, local credit reports in English will help a lot even without a local help in the team.

Also, applying the data from overseas may not work. Thus, getting the intelligence, such as collection efficiency data, from a local provider is a must.

This Credit Insight is an extract from the book Happy Customers Faster Cash, Hong Kong Edition and on sale at Amazon.
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A guide to effective communication in financial Customer Relationship Management with a focus on compliance and credit management for Hong Kong companies. A chapter is dedicated to discussing various aspects of Hong Kong company credit reports.
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