A new product launched by Bolero, the electronic trading platform over which trade data and documentation can be exchanged online, claims its new product will answer the two biggest questions in any cross-border trade transaction: will the seller get paid and will the buyer get the goods?

SURF claims to open up a simpler and more secure way of dealing with international trade by ensuring that both parties to a trade have fulfilled their contractual obligations, allowing payment to take place and the goods to be delivered.

Online correction

According to the developers, once a buyer and seller agree on the contractual terms, the necessary documentation is lodged with the SURF mechanism and every stage of the transaction is then verified and validated.

Users of the new product can cut the time taken to process a typical trade from several weeks to less than a day according to Bolero, which has maintained it is not directly competing for letter of credit (L/C) business. A company statement does however claim that 60 per cent of trade documentation is typically wrong first-time around, and that with SURF, discrepancies and errors can be picked up and corrected immediately.

Collaboration

Another benefit of SURF is that importers and exporters can reconcile order against delivery data, thereby improving inventory management according to Bolero, which also reckons banks will benefit from an ability to offer ready-made online credit and risk products incorporating SURF.

The SURF solution was apparently the result of a year's consultation exercise involving several Bolero members, including eight large banks and a number of major multinationals and trading organisations, including Samsung, Otto Versand and the Colombian Coffee Federation.

This article represents the views of the author and not necessarily those of the ICC or any of the other partners in DC-PRO.