Facing disintermediation from the trade process by the switch from traditional trade to Open Account, the focus within many banks has been on the provision of new products and services to re-engage in the Supply Chain Finance market. Because of this priority, little attention was given to the needs of corporate customers related to traditional trade.

Many banks have successfully deployed customer trade portals and e-banking applications designed to reduce (for the bank) the cost of processing a transaction as well as to lock the customer into a particular bank’s technology and solutions (competitive differentiation as well as up selling and cross selling of other banks services).

Of course this did not help corporate customers who have to manage multiple systems, formats and processes and find it impossible to consolidate information across banks without significant manual effort.

It is now clear that the demand for multi-bank trade finance solutions is no longer restricted to a small number of large global corporate customers. Today, large, medium and small customers in a range of corporate industries as well as commodity traders are increasingly driving adoption of a common multi-bank solution. Particularly in Europe and Asia, but also now in the US, corporate customers and commodity traders have successfully gone live with true multi-bank trade finance initiatives.

As banks have responded to the needs of their customers in this area, the importance of a neutral common channel to insulate bank and corporate from lock-in to each other’s specific solution has become an essential requirement along with the need to meet each bank’s exacting requirements for compliance, security, audit and the management of risk and liability.

Increasingly banks realise the need to have a single multi-bank strategy rather than to be driven by potentially customer-specific requirements, or to waste time and money on speculative standards and bank-led solutions which are not proven or even used by any customers. Indeed many realise that the extension of existing bank initiatives merely adds to the problems to the corporate customer which were created by these technologies in the first place!

Bolero has emerged as the fastest growing multi-bank service for trade finance, uniquely providing a neutral solution for both banks and corporates. A growing number of banks globally are now live on the Bolero multi-bank trade finance service with one or multiple customers. A number of banks now have unlimited global subscriptions and many are now proactively offering Bolero as its multi-bank channel, or through white-labelled services.

Bolero is increasingly recognized as the only proven and fit-for-purpose global communication channel and standards for multi-bank trade finance. And this is driving standard Bolero enablement of a growing number of corporate and bank back office systems related to trade and trade finance.

While the key benefits to a Corporate customer from Bolero’s multi-bank service are:

• Reduction in administration, operation costs and fees
• Global visibility and multi-bank/multi-party consolidation available at any time
• Reduced time to cash (our customers have reported 5-9 days reduction in time to cash)
• Improved quality of information and data, significantly reducing discrepancies and enabling straight through processing (STP)
• Effective management and use of credit lines

The primary benefits of the Bolero multi bank trade finance service to a Bank or other Financial Institution are:

• Compliance with strict bank liability, audit and security requirements
• Support for an initiative closely linked with Bank Industry Infrastructure
• Driving a standard in the Corporate Multi-Bank space – reduced the cost of infrastructure, reduces risk and over time provides opportunity for further reduction in transaction costs through mass adoption and increased volume.
• Extension of German DTA standardisation to a broader global market and the extension to Guarantees
• Opportunity for future automation and additional bank services
• Automated Compliance Checking (eliminates costly manual document checking)
• Pre-checking
• Pre-advising
• Extension into supply chain
• Once a Bank has accepted/realised that there will be a need to support multi-bank automation for more customers this opens up the true direct value to the bank:
• Improved Share of Customer business through pro-active support of a Customer’s multi-bank automation program
• TCO benefit of using Bolero SaaS solution verses “building an alternative multi-bank gateway”
• Eliminate Risk and Cost of having to support multiple different Corporate initiatives driven by various key corporate customers
• Reduced cost and risk of integration through a single messaging gateway to the Bolero platform.
• Straight Through Processing (STP) to/from bank back office reduced the cost of processing a transaction