It is well understood that a significant amount of working capital is locked up in the financial supply chain. The move to global sourcing in pursuit of lower supply costs has generally increased the working capital required, introduced additional bottlenecks and potential inefficiencies in the global supply chain, increasing the headaches for both the CFO and for the Supply Chain executives.

Among the key contributors to inefficiency are the still largely paper-based processes required to support the traditional trade finance instruments; notably the Letter of Credit, Standby Letters of Credit, Guarantees and Collections.

Although a number of banks have invested in technology to automate some of these processes, this automation has been designed to lower the cost of processing the transaction by the bank rather than to meet the requirements of their corporate customers. Indeed in many cases the use of such bank systems simply pushes more issues to the corporate in terms of additional data entry, and the need for the corporate to support multiple channels, platforms, formats and processes.

Large, medium and small corporates in Asia, Europe and the Americas are increasingly turning to an alternative open multi-bank solution which is easy to use, available “on-demand” requiring little or no infrastructure investment, and standardized across all of the corporates banking partners.

Adopted by a rapidly increasing number of corporates globally and supported by a growing number of Banks offering Trade Finance services, Bolero is fast becoming the standard for multi-bank automation of the trade finance processes.

Whether using Bolero’s powerful web applications (Bolero 4Business) which deliver easy-to-use multi-bank applications for Letters of Credit, Stand-by Letters of Credit, Guarantees and Collections, or whether used to enable third party or in-house developed trade finance management solutions, Bolero provides a unique secure multi-banking service which brings together corporates and banks on a neutral highly secure collaborative channel.

Unlike other initiatives, this is not a solution designed purely for the benefit of one party. Bolero provides a comprehensive messaging infrastructure (Bolero Open4Trade) in support of the end-to-end trade finance processes involving both corporate and bank. In addition, the hosted neutral, trusted third party nature of the Bolero service ensures that both Corporate and Bank are fully insulated from the specific solutions or technology choices of the other party.

The unique characteristics of the Bolero service allow truly electronic collaboration between a corporate and its banks based on trade finance messages which are fully checked by Bolero for accuracy, consistency, and validity as well as ensuring the identity of both sender and recipient.

While providing comprehensive multi-bank trade finance functionality for the corporate customer, Bolero also ensures that this meets the exacting needs of Banks for compliance security and audit. Bolero also benefits the bank in providing a single multi-bank channel for all corporate customers while ensuring ease of interoperability and integration with the bank back office systems.

Bolero is designed to be fully interoperable and compliant with the ICC Process Standards and related SWIFT’s message standards.

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

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