Mr. Shangkong | Men with personal loans

If you work and live in Hong Kong, I’m pretty sure many of you must have received dozens of cold calls from commercial banks like HSBC and Standard Chartered already this year.

For what? They want to offer you personal loans. In some cases, you can get even more than one million Hong Kong dollars.

On average, I get at least one of these calls a day -- and that makes me wonder if those Hong Kong banks are drowning in deposits as liquidity swamps the city’s banking system. Otherwise, why would they bother to phone perfect strangers, begging them to take some money off their hands (even if it’s only for a set term and they get charged interest)?

The telephone conversation usually starts like this: first, a bank sales representative will say “congratulations” to you because the bank has offered a so-called “preliminary approval” for your personal loan. If you want to know more details, the sales person will be very happy to try to convince you how low the interest rates will be.

This year some Hong Kong banks are hesitated to provide loans to small- and medium-sized private companies amid growing worries about global economic outlook. Several commercial banks, including Singapore's DBS that has been expanding its business aggressively in Hong Kong in the past one to two years, already said that their loan growth could slow down for the rest of the year.

In this case, some of the banks apparently decided to turn to high-quality individual clients. Typically, those target customers for personal loans are individuals who have healthy credit record at the banks and also have good and stable jobs that can make sure their payrolls are secured to repay the loans in the future.