Together With Aspire: How Hongda Business keeps cross-border collections fast, lean, and cost-efficient

About Hongda Business

Hongda Business is a cross-border consulting firm that helps overseas companies enter China and Chinese companies expand globally. Its services span company incorporation, banking setup, visa applications, accounting, tax advisory, HR outsourcing, IP management, and special licensing. Led by founder Ms. He, Hongda's client base spans the UK, US, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and China.

The Challenge

Before partnering with Aspire, Hongda's payment collection process carried two persistent pain points:

• High transaction costs: When clients in the UK or the US wired consulting fees through a traditional bank, payments passed through cross-border transfer charges, intermediary bank deductions, and receiving fees on Hongda's end. On smaller invoices, the amount that actually landed could be significantly less than what the client sent. Refunds made the situation worse as each reversal triggered another round of deductions.
• Slow processing and onboarding: Other platforms Hongda explored had been built primarily for e-commerce customers, which meant the product logic and compliance processes weren't designed for a consulting firm's revenue structure—service agreements, invoice-based collection, and multi-currency receipts from different markets.

Partnering with Aspire

Partnering with Aspire improved Hongda's payment operations in three key areas:

• Zero-fee cross-border collection: With Aspire, Hongda can provide UK clients with a local GBP account number and US clients with a local USD account number. The client makes a domestic transfer—no cross-border routing, no intermediary banks, no deductions on either side. In many cases, the transfer fee drops to zero for the client, and Hongda's receiving cost falls significantly as well.
• Fully remote account opening: With Aspire, the entire onboarding process was completed online. No branch visits and offline paperwork were required. For a lean consulting operation, Hongda was able to save on both time and administrative cost.
• Simplified daily reconciliation: Aspire's interface displays payer information explicitly with each incoming payment. When 6 to 10 payments arrive daily from different markets, being able to immediately match each transaction to its corresponding invoice keeps reconciliation manageable for a single person—even as the business grows.