Tradetech 40: Finastra, on digitalisation in trade finance

By Deepesh Patel

Deepesh Patel is Editorial Director at Trade Finance Global (TFG) and host of Trade Finance Talks. Deepesh regularly chairs and speaks at international industry events held by the IFC, EBRD, IMN, WTO, Financial Times and Economist Impact, as well as industry associations including ICC, FCI, ITFA, ICISA and BAFT.

Last updated on 02 Feb 2021

22 Feb 2019 1 min reading time

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Finastra

Torsten has over 19 years’ experience in global transaction banking, having held a range of senior leadership positions at Deutsche Bank, including CIO for Cash & Trade Finance, prior to joining Finastra. Today he oversees Finastra’s corporate banking products and solutions, covering lending, trade, supply chain finance, cash management and corporate channels. As the financial services industry addresses the challenge of business transformation, he’s proactively involved in shaping and delivering the corporate banking solutions of the future and in leading the team in delivering outstanding products and services, and supporting seamless integration and continuous innovation.

Formed in 2017 by the combination of Misys and D+H, Finastra provides the broadest portfolio of financial services software in the world today—spanning retail banking, transaction banking, lending, and treasury and capital markets. Its solutions enable customers to deploy mission critical technology on premises or in the cloud. Through open, secure and reliable solutions, Finastra empowers its customers to accelerate growth, optimize cost, mitigate risk and continually evolve to meet the changing needs of their customers. 90 of the world’s top 100 banks use Finastra technology.

How is Finastra using technology to disrupt, enhance or grow international trade?

At Finastra our solutions for intelligent trade services ensure fast time-to-market, compliance and end-to-end digitisation for our clients, allowing them to move faster at lower cost, and risk. Integrated with our connected corporate banking suite, our supply and trade finance applications are linked with commercial lending, cash management and treasury to give our clients a unified digital experience across operations. Furthermore, with connectivity to our FusionFabric.cloud platform all our trade finance clients gain access to value-added applications, such as AI tools, KYC processes and document checking applications from our trusted partners.

Why do you think Finastra is represented in the Tradetech 40?

Finastra has always been at the forefront of digitalisation in trade and supply chain finance, and in evolving with the future trade ecosystem. With 9,000 customers and 90 of the world’s top 100 banks using Finastra, we power ~10% of daily Trade Finance operations worldwide.

As the driving force behind the World Trade Symposium, an annual conference tackling key issues in trade with industry leaders, Finastra has made a commitment to advance financial inclusion and trade globally through open markets, open finance and open architecture.

What are your biggest plans for 2019?

We’re constantly exploring ways to evolve the services we deliver to our clients. One way we’re doing this is through integrating our existing solutions with the latest technologies such as AI, RPA, blockchain and cloud. We’re currently doing this with our Fusion LenderComm solution for syndicated lending which integrates with R3’s Blockchain Corda platform. In 2019 and beyond, we will also continue to build an ecosystem of banks, fintechs and trusted partners on our FusionFabric.cloud platform to enable collaboration and drive innovative solutions for our corporate clients.

What are your top predictions for 2019?

There is a recognition in the industry that the BigTech and platform companies – such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple– have, and will potentially further disrupt banks. Banks have started to understand that they need to change the way they collaborate and co-innovate with BigTech companies & FinTechs by embracing the platforms and open API ecosystems that they provide. We will also see more and more bank CIOs with BigTech or FinTech backgrounds helping embrace the transformation journey that banks have started.