Introduction

In today’s round of SPEEDA User’s Voice, we hear from Alycia Lee Mie Sin, Director & Principal Consultant of Treasure Advisory, a firm that specialises in Transfer Pricing and Business Funding.

Treasure Advisory Sdn Bhd (TASB) is a boutique business consultancy firm based in Malaysia. The company focuses on advisory services to business owners and companies mainly based in local jurisdictions.

The company focuses on three core businesses. 1) Business funding, 2) Transfer pricing documentation services and 3) Training in transfer pricing.
Alycia shared: “We pride ourselves in spending valuable time to understand our clients’ business needs to achieve the desired outcome for them.”

“SPEEDA’s offering is of utmost relevance to our business direction and requirements. We fell in love at first sight.”

 The company started to utilise SPEEDA in Sep 2022. Since then, the team has been using the platform daily as a resource hub for industry analysis for its clients with regional presence.

How the team is using SPEEDA?

For Benchmarking Studies

Pricing policy is one supporting document that taxpayers utilise to substantiate that prices transacted between its related parties are based on Transfer Pricing Guidelines. The fundamental principle of transfer pricing is in establishing that the prices transacted between related parties are at arm’s length, which naturally requires benchmarking and comparable analysis. The tools available in SPEEDA comes in handy for us to extract the relevant comparable information when performing benchmarking studies.

TASB prepares both full and limited transfer pricing documentation. Full transfer pricing (Full TP) documentation is regulatory for companies that hit the controlled transactions threshold as determined by the provisions in the Income Tax Act 1967, as outlined in the Malaysia Transfer Pricing Guidelines. On the other hand, limited TP documentation focuses on intercompany transactions that fall below the threshold. When it comes to audit investigation from the Tax Authorities and the formulation of defence strategies, insofar as arm’s length pricing approach is concerned, benchmarking analysis serves as an important aspect of any transfer pricing documentation.

“SPEEDA comes in handy for benchmarking and industry analysis.
It reduced our processing time in obtaining information for the selection of comparable data.”

Before using SPEEDA, we utilised different sources such as “the Association directories dictionary” or the “yellow pages” to extract information. Suffice to say, it was a laborious process. One full transfer pricing project could take up to 6 working days to mine data and to conduct analysis for comparable companies. Now, SPEEDA allows the team to complete the data mining process and systemise the procedure, all in one platform, within 20% of the previous timeframe.

For Research Work Support

Research is a pertinent step in the evaluation process that positions the company in the industry and forecast the risks that the business might face in the future. Data must be reliable, accurate, up-to-date, and substantiated, which is why we rely on SPEEDA. It has increased our analytical competency by extracting data in the shortest time.

For instance, SPEEDA helped the team tremendously in a recent research exercise on the logistics industry for frozen and chilled products in Singapore and Malaysia. This research had required up-to-date information about the industry’s performance and whether the COVID-19 pandemic held any significant impact on the financial performance of companies that are operating in this FMCG sector.

SPEEDA has a unique feature where its own set of industry codes help filter and identify relevant companies in their listing. In addition to its vast database, SPEEDA’s consultants have been providing great support in our research work. Our SPEEDA account manager provides significant assistance in helping to speed up our quest in information procurement.

The “Ask a Consultant” feature allows its users to post questions regarding data extraction on the platform, as well as addressing queries on any search for a particular set of information.

“SPEEDA is helping the team with company analysis and understanding the industry performance.”

For Funding Business

We are delighted to find that SPEEDA also provides a great hand in the industry analysis for our funding advisory services to companies and business owners. A well-thought credit proposal often requires adequate analysis to support a funding application to banks, financial institution, government agencies and corporate investors.

We often analyse our clients’ competitiveness and business performance against the industry’s performance at a regional level. The competitive edge of borrowers is critical to determine whether the borrowers would be financially sound to service the loans provided by the lenders.

With SPEEDA’s financial information, we are able to provide credit proposals with credible information for potential lenders or funders to evaluate the sustainable strength of potential borrowers.

Company’s Future Goal

While building a presence in Malaysia, our company’s future goal is to expand our network to Cambodia and Thailand within this year. Thereon we are looking at Vietnam and Indonesia in the next three years.

We are excited that we can rely on SPEEDA to mine information, and subsequently, to tap into those transfer pricing players and experts for positive collaboration in order to provide better service to our clients in the future.