On October 27, Global Finance conducted a Sub-custody Roundtable, moderated by publisher and editorial director Joseph Giarraputo.
The pandemic has brought additional urgency to the need to solve the hurdles hindering fragile supply chains and the financing of trade.
For banks, digitalization offers a reduction in operating costs and more accurate records of transactions, which can be used to provide trade insights.
Using artificial intelligence to interpret scanned documents and check them against a set of predefined rules and regulations allows banks to focus on the anomalies highlighted by AI, rather than spend their time on labor-intensive reading of documents manually and other repetitive tasks that take up much of their time.
The digital ledger of transactions created on a blockchain, provides trade participants with all the necessary trade information in one digital document.
Last year, the World Bank said that to fully reap the benefits of new technologies, the entire trade ecosystem—banks, regulators, border agencies, trade bodies and corporates—must work together to apply digital innovation and drive efficiencies.
This year’s ratings, which cover 102 countries and eight regions, were based on performance during the period from the fourth quarter of 2020 through the third quarter of 2021.
It is not necessary to enter in order to win, but experience shows that the additional information supplied in an entry can increase the chance of success.
Global Finance uses a proprietary algorithm with criteria—such as knowledge of local conditions and customer needs, financial strength and safety, strategic relationships and governance, competitive pricing, capital investment and innovation in products and services—weighted for relative importance.
Great breadth and depth in trade finance services and solutions helped BNP Paribas win this year’s Global Best Trade Finance Provider–Bank award.
Investment in innovation to improve the global trade process features strongly in the French bank’s digital transformation as it seeks to empower clients in their own digitalization efforts.
Recent innovations include Connexis Guarantees, to enhance the issuance and reporting capabilities of business guarantees.
By integrating Fusion Trade Innovation with Enigio’s trace:original solution, Finastra, our Best Trade Finance Provider–Non-Bank, created an app solution for managing and handling digital original documents using distributed ledger technology—removing the need for a central registry or document repository.
Internally, various trade finance documents are automated using robotic process automation and Shinhan is applying artificial intelligence for the screening of documents to ensure they meet evolving global sanction compliance.
The bank won the Best Use of Artificial Intelligence in Trade Finance award for creating an online evaluation system that recommends the best trade finance offers to clients.
By calculating the carbon footprint contained in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with each transaction, traders can use a green score to generate green trade reports and apply for invoice financing by assessing sustainability.
The Best Trade Finance Software Provider, CGI made recent back-office enhancements to CGI Trade360, using application programming interfaces to help clients and drive trade and supply chain finance innovation.
We awarded Best DLT Platform for Trade Finance to we.trade, which commercially launched in 2019 as the world’s first enterprise-grade, blockchain-enabled trade finance platform—connecting buyers, sellers, banks and logistics companies in a network that simplifies cross-border trading.
The 150-year-old bank has improved its agility by implementing new technologies that help it process more than €30 billion in LoCs annually.
Russia’s VTB Bank, our Best Bank for Trade Finance in Emerging Markets, increased support for both Russian exports and trade financing operations for clients in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States.
TBD boosted high-value exports and export diversification; safeguarded energy security by mitigating grave fuel shortages; supported industrialization, technology transfer and infrastructure through the import of equipment; creating over a million jobs over time; shoring up the capacity of regional and national financial institutions to support their client base; and facilitating greater intra- and inter-African trade and regional integration—thereby advancing the region’s socioeconomic progress.
Societe Generale has also introduced several solutions to help digitalize trade finance documentation, such as automated document checking in the framework, the transformation of images into text thanks to OCR technology, and the classification of documents and automatic extraction of data using named-entity recognition and natural language processing.
Recent innovations include an exports dashboard in India, the digitalization of a highly manual process of cross-border trade import payments and reconciliation in the Philippines, a fully digitalized commercial drafts solution in China and the launch of a sustainable supply chain financing solution.
UniCredit is a trade finance market leader in Central and Eastern Europe , and it’s one of the key banks for euro clearing—acting as a gateway for euro payments to anywhere in the world.
Recent innovations include the expanded use of DocuSign and the rollout of supplier digital onboarding to Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica and Ecuador—also, digital bank guarantees, with real-time, electronic delivery to the beneficiary in Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.
In the Middle East, Arab Bank’s wide network and regional accessibility provide corporations with opportunities to expand across geographies.
As a member of the blockchain-based trade finance Marco Polo Network, BNY Mellon is working on a proof of concept for the use of AI in trade sanction filtering and is currently testing how AI and robotics can be harnessed to read various trade documents.
In Western Europe, BNP Paribas has over 2,000 trade finance experts and provides online trade transaction solutions via Connexis Trade, Connexis Cash, Connexis Guarantee, Connexis LC Export, Connexis Supply Chain, SWIFTNet Trade for Corporates, Centric and the Contour blockchain network.