Bolero has been designed specifically to accommodate ease of interoperability and, where possible, full Straight Through Processing (STP) through standard components and minimal configuration.

Bolero provides a powerful, secure, neutral platform for the provision of multi-party trade, trade finance and financial supply chain services. The underlying “Carrier” capability of Bolero (Bolero Open4Trade) enables a robust loosely-coupled interoperability between constituents. Based on a secure messaging paradigm, each party interoperates with Bolero at a message and/or document level with Bolero taking responsibility for the document and message flows over its neutral hosted platform. This ensures that each party can utilise Bolero without any requirement to build costly peer-to-peer integration with its counterparty. In fact, a user does not need any knowledge of the technology or application environment being utilised by the counterparty, thus protecting all participants from complexity, cost, proprietary interfaces, integration and the ongoing costs of maintenance to keep such interfaces synchronized through application or technology upgrades.

Specifically in the use of Bolero for Multi-Bank LCs and Guarantees for both Importers and Exporters and their partner banks, the use of Bolero ensures that neither corporate nor each bank, need to bear the cost or complexity of integration within the community.

Using the Bolero multi-bank LC and guarantees service a Corporate has a single standard channel to all participating banks regardless of the specific platforms being used by each bank. In addition, the corporate is immune and protected from any maintenance or upgrades to each Bank’s back office systems or web portal. The use of the Bolero channel is typically managed automatically by the corporate’s trade finance application; either the Bolero web-hosted applications (Bolero 4Business) which natively embeds access to the Bolero channel, a third party trade finance application incorporating a certified Bolero “terminal”, or by Bolero-enabling an in-house trade finance application using an embedded connector or the Bolero WebGateway.

Critically, the same is also true for each bank. The bank has a single standard multi-bank channel to all its participating corporate customers regardless of the specific systems in use at each corporate, and even if the corporate is using a third party multi-bank application. Each Bank accesses Bolero through an embedded connector, the Bolero web workbench (Bolero 4Banks) or through the Bolero WebGateway which provides configurable options to implement fully automated interoperability with the Bank back-office systems. Some bank back-office solutions now provide certified “off the shelf” connectors to the Bolero channel.

Central to the ease of interoperability is the use of proven XML document standards in the Bolero Collaboration Libraries (Bolero_XML) and the provision of standard mapping capabilities to other available standards (German DTA format for example).

The Bolero service architecture is designed to support the three fundamental layers of full service interoperability:

1. Data Integration
   • Supports automatic data interchange without the need to re-key data
   • Supports seamless introduction of new documents and new versions
2. Message Integration
   • Supports the automatic sending and receiving of Bolero messages
   • Supports the automatic handling of the Bolero messaging protocol
   • Supports message reconciliation
3. Infrastructure Integration
   • Supports the communication between the back-office system and the Bolero WebGateway or Bolero Connector
   • Allows integration with middleware
   • Allows remote monitoring and management capabilities