Industrial Development Bank of India (IDBI) says it has become the first bank to implement a new document embedding facility for letter of credit (L/C) and bank guarantee messages sent over India's Structured Financial Messaging System (SFMS), the secure messaging standard developed to serve as a platform for intra-bank and inter-bank applications.

The facility will operate on the SFMS platform operated by Indian Financial Technology and Allied Services (IFTAS), the wholly owned Reserve Bank of India (RBI) subsidiary mandated to design, deploy and support information technology related services to India's central bank as well as banks and financial institutions across the country.

Document transmission

IFTAS developed the document embedding facility as part of its efforts to digitise trade finance transactions and support secure financial communication systems.

The new facility allows banks to embed and transmit PDF documents within L/C and bank guarantee messages.

The facility features the transmission of digitally signed documents to ensure reliability of the transaction.

Benefits

The document embedding facility aims to ease the current process of manual verification and reconciliation.

It also provides documentary evidence for all the parties involved in a transaction and is expected to reduce fraud.

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