For more than 2 decades, Bolero has been at the forefront of Trade digitisation. We have been working with largest corporate clients, banks, and shipping companies to digitise their trade processes and identify use cases which were not previously addressed by the market. We were the first to pioneer the commercial usage of the electronic Bill of Lading and over the years we have built up immense knowledge in the trade finance space and we are fortunate to have access to valuable data and research that allows us to build incredible products that bring real value to our customers.

Last year we introduced Galileo, our new technology platform that addresses the new challenges of digital trade in a fast-moving landscape of technological innovation, and customer expectations. With Galileo, we have built a strong foundation that allows us to continually innovate and build novel solutions for banks, carriers, and corporates.

More recently, we launched our new Galileo Multi-Bank for Corporates solution built our new technology platform. With this new solution, we have created a truly open trade ecosystem that enables the convergence of physical and financial supply chain by incorporating multi-banking capability with the electronic bill of lading (eBL) solution that we pioneered.

You can read more about our work so far here.

And this year we are making the biggest leap in trade finance.

The next frontier of digital trade finance; Introducing Galileo TPaaS for Banks

Corporates globally are looking to digitise their trade processes to save time, increase visibility of their transactions, eliminate operational and courier costs, and reduce risks associated with manual processes.

Banks on the other hand have been under significant pressure to provide new and improved digital services to their corporate customers who are pushing for a fully digital experience.

We introduce the world’s first white-labelled trade finance portal-as a-service for Banks; Galileo TPaaS for Banks.

Galileo TPaaS for Banks is the fastest and most cost-effective way for banks to digitise customer experience for their trade finance clients and comes fully branded with the bank’s colour palette and logos. Built on modern technology, it delivers an enhanced user experience, unrivalled functionality, and a broad suite of connectivity options for banks.

Galileo TPaaS for Banks offers a transformed user experience that is simple, intuitive, and designed to give corporate customers greater autonomy in the management of their trade transactions. It comes with market-leading features for trade finance products like Letters of credit, Guarantees/Standby LCs, document presentations under LC with more products in the pipeline.

Galileo TPaaS for Banks comes with:

• Support for all operations under LCs and Guarantees such as issuance, amendment, advising, confirmation, extend or pay, claim etc.
• Collaborative drafting of guarantees between all clients and banks.
• Presentation of documents under LCs and open account.
• Management of electronic Bill of Lading (eBL) lifecycle.
• In-built cloud storage and transmission of documents.
• Complete visibility of trade transactions and history via analytics and reports.
• Ready connectivity with over 200 carriers for getting eBLs.

Trade portal as-a-service 

Galileo TPaaS for Banks is available on-demand as a fully managed service on our secure cloud.

This allows Banks to have an accelerated time to market, reduce the huge costs associated with building a bespoke portal but allow for great flexibility. The bank does not require any infrastructural changes and no requirements for separate deployment.

The commercial model is based on a simple recurring subscription fee.

With Galileo TPaaS for Banks, we can now offer a fully managed trade portal to the bank – as a service on the cloud – and banks can start using the service immediately and onboard their clients.

The bank not only receives the appropriate scaling for their customers but also cutting-edge technology with our future-proof Galileo platform, highly skilled resources, constant support and updates. The hassle of maintaining the solution is eliminated entirely.

Galileo TPaaS is designed for a quick start setup

 With no integrations required to start, Galileo TPaaS for Banks at its core facilitates an accelerated time to market allowing you to get up and running in a matter of days.

Banks can choose the option suitable for them to allow for a quick start. As such, there are two available methods:

1. Direct user access: this method allows bank users to receive and/or respond to client transaction requests using the Galileo bank user interface. This method does not require an any integration. This means that banks can get up and running in no time.
2. Direct connectivity: this is where a bank’s back-office system can directly receive client requests using APIs or any other connectivity option the bank chooses. Galileo comes pre-integrated with the major third-party back-office applications thus shortening the implementation cycle considerably.

With flexible implementation models to choose from, banks can quickly launch digital trade services for their trade clients at lightning speeds. Banks can start with direct access and opt for integration at a later stage.

Galileo TPaaS allows for single sign-on (SSO) connectivity which means the bank’s corporate clients can access the portal from within the bank’s existing corporate channel.

With Galileo TPaaS for banks, we are empowering financial institutions to accelerate the delivery of digital trade services to their clients, whilst also reducing the total cost of ownership in comparison to an in-house build or the traditional software procurement procedures.

We worked with leading corporate clients and financial institutions and designed Galileo TPaaS to help banks to deliver digital trade services to their clients without the need of taking on a complex implementation project or make heavy technology investments towards digitization.

We are continuously adding more features on Galileo and collaborating with other innovative fintech specialists with expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT based solutions to enhance and deepen the functionalities we offer within Galileo TPaaS for Banks.  This will result in a significantly improved customer experience and Increased customer satisfaction through innovative value-added services.

The post Part 2: The next frontier of digital trade finance – Galileo TPaaS for Banks appeared first on Bolero (WiseTech Global Group).

Over the course of the last 20 years, international trade has expanded massively with goods and services traded globally now accounting for over 60% of the global gross domestic product. 

Although trade has changed significantly in the last 20 years, processes have largely remained manual, paper-intensive and complex. Digitising trade processes is not a new initiative, but the previous lack of open standards, regulations and heterogeneous systems has resulted in the creation of digital silos stifling further progress. 

Things however have started to change and trade digitisation has started to pick up momentum due to the evolution of recent technologies like AI, machine learning, open APIs and blockchain. Coupled with the recent challenges brought forth by the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the trade finance community adopt digitisation more readily.  

The benefits of digitising trade processes are clear; trade digitisation reduces the inherent risks of trade, reduces costs, and removes the inefficiencies of complex, paper-intensive and fragmented processes. Switching focus towards trade finance digitisation delivers countless opportunities and benefits for all trade parties. 

We at Bolero have been at the forefront of trade digitisation and innovation for more than two decades. We were the first to roll out a commercial electronic bill of lading solution that allows our clients to receive digital bills of lading from our network of more than 200 shipping carriers across the globe and pass those along to their trade counterparts.  

Bolero’s transformation journey 

With more than 20 years’ experience in trade, maritime and cloud technology, we have access to data and research that allows us to build products that bring incredible value to our customers. And as such we have cemented ourselves as a main stay in the trade finance digitisation community. 

As part of our objectives to build innovative, modern, and intuitive solutions we turned to our customers, partners, and friends in the industry for feedback to fuel our innovation. In these conversations, we were able to spot unmet needs and identified use cases that were not previously addressed by the market. We gained valuable insights from these discussions which have helped us identify improvements, add new functionalities, and create new solutions to address challenges faced by the trade community.  

The first step for our talented team of engineers was to future proof our tech stack to keep up with the latest technology trends and innovations. This gave us the foundations to provide a single point of access to all Bolero services, transform user experience, build robust bank-grade security systems, and improve connectivity with third-party systems allowing us to provide deeper and wider functionalities to our customers.  

This became a reality when we unveiled our new platform Galileo in February 2020.  Our first live module – the Open Account module is enabling exporters and importers to exchange trade documents including electronic bills of lading (eBLs) with each other in a very collaborative and simple way.  

A little more about Galileo  

Galileo is a flexible, modular, and scalable platform that has been designed to deliver future-proofed digital trade services to Banks, Corporates, Carriers and other trade eco-systems. With an enhanced user experience powered by advanced technology, it delivers unrivalled functionality and seamless integration. 

 Galileo is also capable of growing in functionality with its ability to embed best-in-class solutions from our partners as value-added services. Our partnership with Traydstream for document precheck and Mitigram for price discovery makes it even more interesting and comprehensive for end users. 

Figure 1. Our Galileo platform, connectivity and integrations are key.

Galileo Multi-Bank for Corporates; the first solution developed on our new platform. 

Galileo Multi-Bank for Corporates allows customers to send their letters of credit or guarantee transactions to banks using our web application or any third-party portal application. Client transactions are sent to banks on a secured messaging channel and Banks can receive transactions via Bolero’s web application or directly into their back-office systems. 

 Galileo Multi-Bank for Corporates solution offers: 

• A transformed digital user experience that is simple and intuitive. 
• Access to all trade transactions like Letters of Credit, Guarantees, presentations in one place 
• API based connectivity with banks and third-party applications 
• Ready connectivity and access to more than 200 carriers across the globe. Collaborative drafting of trade instruments between customers, counterparties and banks. 
• Real-time visibility of all trade transactions using dashboard, reporting, audit and traceability tools 
• Email and in-app notifications 

Replacement of user certificates with 2-factor authentication using Google authenticator or Microsoft authenticator or Bolero’s own authenticator will allow for quick onboarding of clients on Galileo.  Over the next 12 months, we hope to move all our existing customers to our Galileo Multi-Bank for Corporates solution.  

The collaborative process between our teams and customers allowed us to use that feedback to develop an innovative platform that addresses the difficulties the trade community faces. We are extremely pleased with our progress and the positive responses received from customers, partners, and prospects. The responses have driven us, even more, to make sure we continue to develop cutting-edge and innovative solutions. 

The biggest leap is yet to come 

With our new technology platform, we have built a strong foundation that allows us to continually innovate and build novel solutions for banks, carriers and corporates.  

We have solved important issues corporates have been facing with the release of our Galileo Multi-Bank for corporates solution by providing a transformed user experience and better connectivity with banks and at the same time eliminating the time spent on manual processes.  

On the other hand, banks have not been able to offer a fully digitised service to their trade customers due to the immense cost, time and the complex implementation processes required to offer a fully digitised user journey. This is a gap in the market that we believe we can fulfil.  

For some time now, this has been an area of intense interest for us at Bolero. We have been working tirelessly in close collaboration with one of the biggest financial institutions in the world to address these issues so that we can bridge this gap and enable banks to offer a fully digital trade finance experience to their clients. 

We are close to sharing our newest innovation and the biggest leap in the trade finance space and we cannot wait to tell you more about this in the coming days. 

The post Our journey with Galileo, the biggest leap in trade finance digitisation yet, pt.1 appeared first on Bolero (WiseTech Global Group).

Global trade is on the cusp of a major digital transformation. Exporters, importers, banks and carriers are continuously trying to streamline paper-intensive operational processes, seeking safer, smarter and faster digital solutions.

While the industry is buzzing with options such as distributed ledger technology, AI/NLP, RPA etc., in reality most organisations still find digitisation a bridge that is difficult to cross. The industry in itself has come a long way with governments and trade bodies taking steps to create and foster trade ecosystems. Yet the lack of ubiquity and interoperability in these disparate initiatives still remains a challenge for businesses.

We at Bolero, are pleased to announce the launch of Galileo, our brand new platform for digital trade that seeks to solve some of these key challenges. Galileo has been designed to keep the customer experience central, enabling seamless interactive digital conversations. It is truly open and ecosystem-ready; the only digital platform that enables the convergence of physical and financial supply chain by incorporating multi-banking capability with eBL flows.

In the new platform, corporate clients will be able to access all Bolero services through a single user interface, get end-to-end visibility of their transactions and connect with their counterparties and multiple banks.

Banks will have a consolidated view of transactions across different clients and will be able to connect the new platform with their back-office systems through APIs.

With Galileo’s modern and open architecture, Bolero will provide value-added services to clients through pre-integrated partner solutions. Document pre-check is one such service that we are adding in partnership with Traydstream. As trade technology evolves, clients can expect new services to be added much in the same way as an app store.

Galileo has been designed in collaboration with our customers spanning corporates , carriers and banks and brings together the collective mindshare from over two decades of trade experience and industry-wide expertise. It redefines the user experience and promises to deliver much more  functionality.

With the new Galileo platform, we have future-proofed digitisation to make it more accessible, more connected and fully capable of integration with critical third-party applications. Galileo will provide access to the best of the world’s evolving trade eco-systems, where interoperability opens the door to new solutions and new services.

Personally, working on Galileo has been a very fulfilling experience. You can read the exclusive interview that Global Trade Review did with Andrew Raymond and myself. Inviting more conversations around Galileo at anchal.tiwari@bolero.net

Save

The post Bolero’s new Galileo platform is the future of trade digitisation appeared first on Bolero (WiseTech Global Group).