A combined $300 million in financing to assist Asia's supply chains in increasing manufacturing capability for COVID-19 vaccines will be provided by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and HSBC to boost large-scale inoculation programs in Asian countries.

The lenders said Friday they will provide funds through trade loans and invoice financing, among other tools, as countries across Asia attempt to reduce the usual multi-year time scale.

"Right now demand for vaccines far outstrips supply and one of the challenges is that supply and distribution networks have to be formed, which requires a lot of liquidity," Surath Sengupta, global head of financial institutions at HSBC, said in a statement to Reuters. 

The move builds on a risk-sharing scheme initiated by the banks in July to assist in funding suppliers of personal protective equipment (PPE) and vaccine makers as they struggle to meet global demand that outpaces supply.

Private sector lenders, such as HSBC, can lend more easily to companies in the complex chain of vaccine supply production by relying on the ADB's sovereign-level credit rating, HSBC said. 

HSBC assembled a crack team of some of its most senior dealmakers in December in an attempt to use its financial clout to help transport millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines around the world.

The U.K. lender gathered a dozen of its most senior investment bankers to form a working group that aims to provide financing and other banking services to governments, pharmaceutical companies, and logistics firms to ensure coronavirus vaccines are developed and distributed.

Governments scrambled to secure millions of doses of new Covid-19 vaccines, which were being manufactured at a rapid rate at the time, in the hopes of putting an end to a pandemic that had claimed millions of lives and caused economic devastation.

The U.K. became the first Western nation to start vaccinating its citizens, having cleared the usage of the Pfizer and BioNtech jabs.