TFG recorded live from SIBOS London. This year’s conference theme was “Thriving in a hyper-connected world”. It was recognizing the challenges and opportunities that mass digitisation and data-driven relationships present for the Sibos community.
TFG heard from Alexander Goulandris the co-CEO of essDOCS about the different solutions for paperless trade.
Featuring: Alexander Goulandris, Co-CEO, essDOCS
Host: Deepesh Patel, Editor, Trade Finance Global
So what are the core solutions through which essDOCS is helping to enable paperless and fully digital trade?
So essDOCS has sort of three prongs. Our first is Certificates of Origin at a platform called essCert, has about 250 Chambers of Commerce across 14 countries. We have a series of solutions we call transition technologies, they facilitate automation in part but don’t necessarily fully get rid of the paper. And then we have our core solution that we’re best known for which is CargoDocs and DocEx which is all about electronic Bills and Lading, electronic warehouse warrants, and technology in a legal solution to facilitate cross border paperless documentation.
Okay, and what sort of traction and uptake are you experiencing in digital trade? So how many customers perhaps are using your solutions today?
So today we go 45,000 customers using our solutions in and out of about 200 countries, so pretty global.
Great. And one of the big challenges cited today across the industry when it comes to digitising trade is interoperability between various systems, we see siloed data, some people call them digital islands. Are you seeing this and how to how can we address this problem?
Yeah, so the paper itself was solving a digital island problem, someone’s ERP system didn’t connect to the bank’s system. Now we’re replacing that with a solution that sets themselves a digital Island. So we’re definitely seeing that. EssDOCS is addressing that, actually through API’s, we connect across different platforms and across different consortium solution sets. And by doing that we can connect essentially across the whole supply chain.
Great. And are you working with any of the trade or trade finance consortium’s that run on kind of DLT.
So lots of trade and trade finance consortiums on DLT these days. We’ve recently been doing some transactions with Voltron, which we’ve embedded into. We’re doing, we’re finalising embedding into a Chinese based consortium focused on energy and chemicals. And we probably got about 10 or 15 other projects similar to that. So definitely the API, the integration across platforms is getting a lot of traction at the moment.
Great. And what should we be excited about from essDOCS in the next three to six months or so?
So the big thing for us is we’ve been asked by a few banks to launch a replacement to the SWIFT TSU which has been shelved next year. So we’re going to be launching a product called see Cmatch before the end of the year. So we’re pretty excited by that.
Thank you for coming and joining us today.
Thank you very much for having me. Good seeing you at SIBOS.
