We caught up with the Head of Trade Finance at Asian Development Bank, Steve Beck. We talked about the newly published Trade Finance Gaps, Growth, and Jobs Survey.

We caught up with the Head of Trade Origination & Advisory at Natwest Bank, to talk about trade in the UK, given the current uncertain geopolitical climate around Brexit. We asked Rowan Austin about the current outlook for UK SMEs, trade barriers and how the bank is approaching trade and transaction banking digitisation through some of its initiatives at Sibos 2019.

AGTB: New kid on the block. TFG heard from Daniel Gould, Deputy CEO of Anglo Gulf Trade Bank, and its new digital offering for trade finance in the UAE and MENA region. Building a trade bank from scratch without relying on legacy technologies has enabled AGTB to reimagine trade finance, building a competitive product for the corporate banking space.

TFG heard from Joel Schrevens Global Solutions Director of China Systems about the state of the trade and supply chain finance ecosystem. Established in 1983, China Systems is a leading trade services solutions vendor. The company is fully focused on providing an integrated front-end and back-office platform catering for internal and external deployment at a domestic, regional or global level.

TFG heard from Alexander Goulandris the co-CEO of essDOCS about the different solutions for paperless trade.

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.

Existing systems are woefully inefficient, siloed or still paper-based and many of them have not improved for decades. The Marco Polo Network is working with Financial Institutions, Corporates and Technology & Service Providers to remove the barriers preventing them from operating at their best.

AGTB: New kid on the block. TFG heard from Daniel Gould, Deputy CEO of Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank, and its new digital offering for trade finance in the UAE and MENA region. Building a trade bank from scratch without relying on legacy technologies has enabled AGTB to reimagine trade finance, building a competitive product for the corporate banking space.

The Italian Banking market continues to face headwinds and pressures around new payment service directives (PSDII), challenges from the regulator, and changing customer needs. TFG caught up with the CEO of regtech innovator CBI about their latest product CBI Globe, and how this is positioned to help Italian banks succeed and grow.

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.