Supported by local partner, CMC Technology and Solution (CMC TS) in Vietnam, Surecomp was selected by BIDV to deliver its trade finance platform as part of a broader digital transformation strategy. Trade finance and bank guarantees being one of the bank’s most important service offerings, the implementation will now enable BIDV to meet current and future demand.
Hosted on their own servers in Hanoi, the solutions were deployed and supported by Surecomp’s local teams in Asia. Through improved efficiency and faster response times, the digitised operation will help BIDV maintain competitive edge and deliver an improved customer service. This in turn will allow customers to better manage their import and export activities. Taking a pioneering approach to digital innovation, the flexibility of the solutions will also allow the bank to amend and customise their trade finance instruments as their requirements evolve.
In May 2022, Surecomp launched its collaborative trade finance platform RIVO, bringing together an ecosystem of corporates, financial institutions, and fintechs. RIVO is an application programming interface-based platform designed to connect the industry. The solution accelerates the issuance and monitoring of all trade finance instruments, enabling companies of every size to finalise finance agreements and execute trade finance transactions within hours. Accessed via an intuitive interface, participants can benefit from a range of scalable subscription packages to meet current and future needs, including a free plan to get started.
In 2021, Surecomp expanded its Trade Finance-as-a-Service (TFaaS) offering to enable smaller and mid-sized banks to improve their trade finance processing efficiencies and customer service. The service offering allows banks to benefit from DOKA-NG – its back-office trade finance solution – via a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) deployment. This was one of the service expansions reinforcing Surecomp’s mission to digitise the trade finance domain and facilitating a more efficient and customer-centric trade finance operation for banks.
A survey carried out by Surecomp in 2022 found only 6% of respondents being ‘entirely happy’ with their current trade finance process. Almost four out of ten are unhappy with their existing arrangements, noting that their current processes – many of which still involve spreadsheets – are error-prone (57%), time-consuming (41%), or too complicated (15%). Other challenges include reliance on paper (10%) and the inability to use multi-banking options (10%).
Two-thirds of respondents said that they currently communicate with their trade finance banks, financiers, and trade counterparts by email, while 15% are using fax, and 14% communicate by post. With so much bank communication involving at least some manual processing, roughly half of the respondents (49%) cite using no digital channel at all. While one quarter (27%) considers spreadsheets and email as digital, another quarter (24%) uses bank portals or similar.
The results show that despite the availability of tools and systems that can facilitate the automation of current manual processes, trade finance participants, especially banks and financial institutions, remain behind the curve.
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