With the development of more interconnected alternative finance options for businesses and the emergence of open banking in the marketplace, the option of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending is seeing a great increase in popularity over the years among its SME audience.
It seems nowadays unicorn businesses are emerging in the venture capital scene with accelerating frequency. With an increasingly mobile and technologically capable world, fin-tech companies and eCommerce startups are dominating most of the visible market now. Is startup growth really as proliferate and fast-paced as it may seem? The answer is an unsurprising, billion-dollar “yes”.
Trade and supply chain finance is at the forefront of innovation as there are currently many pain points for corporate clients and banks. As the industry moves towards a platform model, we heard from Accenture’s Cecile Leruste on thee major transition and megatrends going on in commodity finance.
Banks are often slow to adopt the latest technology, and in many cases that is warranted. As highly regulated institutions tasked with protecting valuable data, banks understandably want to avoid “running with scissors.” By starting slow with simply implementing APIs in a few areas, they can begin to modernize and ultimately provide streamlined payments solutions, like RTPs, to their largest pool of customers.
We interviewed Geoff Brady, Head of Global Trade & Supply Chain Finance (GTS) at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. We talked about the physical and financial aspects of the supply chain management, about the importance of Blockchain Consortia in the trade finance space and the BAML’s agenda for the rest of the year.
Alfa-Bank and Novolipetsk Steel Company (NLMK), in cooperation with Commerzbank, Germany, and Vesuvius GmbH, Germany, have launched a pilot project of cross-border payments via the Marco Polo international trade finance network. For Marco Polo, it is the first Russian-German import-export operations financing project.
TFG spoke to the author of ‘Digital Ecosystems within Trade Finance’, a BCG, SWIFT and ICC report on the state of networks and consortia, the key problem points within trade and trade finance, as well as the current barriers in terms of digitalisation both from a corporate and bank perspective. Deepesh spoke to Sukand Ramachandran at BCG about how global trade is changing and the role of digital ecosystems within this.
“I joined SWIFT as part of the 5 man global sales team in 1985, so SIBOS in Brighton was my first … and of course it was memorable…I stayed for 20 years, attended 23 SIBOS events across the world- pioneering days … no mobile phones, paper based processes, no internet …’
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has released the results of the 2019 rendition of their annual Trade Finance Gaps, Growth, and Jobs Survey. ADB’s vast network of respondents includes 112 banks from 47 countries, 53 export credit agencies from 17 countries, 39 forfaiters from 20 countries, and 336 other firms from 68 different countries around the globe.
All global industries require standards. Remember what a huge step forward it was when the carrier industry agreed on the design for a shipping container. The same is true for electronic trade documents and their supporting systems.
