Emaar designs a blueprint for digitising India’s real estate sector

India’s real estate sector is undergoing rapid change. New regulations like the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 (RERA) have been introduced to safeguard the interest of home buyers and boost investments within the real estate sector. RERA allows developers to utilise only 30 percent of buyers’ money for day-to-day operational requirements, while the remaining 70 percent is to be put into a special RERA account that can only be withdrawn for specified purposes following certification of the project spend by engineers, chartered accountants and architects.

This has created new complexities for developers and their local banking partners on allocating buyers’ funds into specific accounts across its vast array of projects. Doing so manually carried risk of error, and hindered turnaround time on compliance reporting.

In sharp contrast to other industries such as e-commerce and retail, which have quickly adopted cashless payments, the real estate sector has been predominantly reliant on traditional payment methods like cheques when making advance payments. Typically, this involves significant manual processing for developers on reconciliation, updating of customer accounts and processing refunds in the event of cancellations.

Therefore, Emaar sought to adopt a comprehensive automated banking solution that could not only address RERA requirements but also streamline its collections processes.

With HSBC’s support, Emaar implemented a comprehensive receivables solution that digitised collection of customer advances for new projects, and automated the allocation of funds in line with the RERA requirements.

Firstly, HSBC and Emaar created a multi-tiered Virtual Account (VA) structure, where unique Virtual Account numbers are assigned to each individual housing project and unit. Whenever buyers book a unit, Emaar is subsequently able to generate and assign VA numbers to each buyer and their corresponding invoices directly from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which are automatically tagged to the VA for the buyer’s desired unit. The relevant VA numbers are then posted on each invoice for the buyer to pay to.

Through an integrated payment gateway supported by HSBC’s Omni Collect solution, buyers can then pay for their homes via bank transfer to the VA number quoted on each invoice, reducing reliance on manual tracking of cheques to specific units. When a payment is received, all tagged VA numbers are automatically reflected in the payment information, allowing each payment to be identified via invoice, buyer, unit and project. This information is fed directly into Emaar’s ERP system to automate reconciliation of payments against invoices.

Leveraging HSBC’s Global Liquidity Engine (GLE), received funds are then automatically swept to the corresponding project accounts, with 70 percent of funds placed into RERA accounts, and the remaining 30 percent swept into operating accounts, making Emaar one of the first real estate companies in India to utilise automated sweeps to adhere to RERA guidelines. The automated solution has eliminated the need for manual intervention, while ensuring timely and accurate Management Information System (MIS) reports for compliance and reporting purposes.

• Fully digitised end-to-end collections process in line with RERA requirements, pioneering the use of digital payments within India’s real estate sector
• Improved straight-through-processing of demand letters generated, which are now automatically reconciled on Emaar’s ERP system upon receipt
• Scalable infrastructure – additional VAs can be generated for each new project and buyer, allowing Emaar to continuously realise the solution’s benefits as their business grows
• Significant resource and time savings- traditional cheque clearing and reconciliation required significant manual efforts
• Automated sweeps enable same day allocation of funds, instead of the previous T+3 timeline
• Facilitate timely periodic reporting to local authorities

Emaar’s solution was selected as the overall winner in the “Excellence in Use of Technology in South Asia” category in the 2025 CorporateTreasurer Awards.