Standard Chartered has become the latest bank to migrate its trade finance processes, including letters of credit (L/Cs) to an online platform. The bank says its B2BeX web-based trade facilitation platform will revolutionise the way that companies conduct trade.

B2BeX aims to provide users with a convenient one-stop shop in a secure on-line environment for parties to international trades, including suppliers, buyers, related companies, transport and logistics companies, insurers, inspection agencies and financial services providers.

Streamline

The new platform will enable customers to streamline all their supply chain activities with an extensive range of trade-related services available on the platform according to the bank. It has arranged for users to gain access to over 20 leading service providers from the shipping, insurance, catalogue and other trade-related lines of business.

By integrating key trade processes end-to-end, and delivering them on a single platform, B2BeX is designed to enable different parties in the trade process to exchange documents and data with each other, including L/Cs, purchase orders, confirmations, shipping instructions in a more automated manner.

Simplifying international trade

The platform includes a product catalogue where buyers and suppliers can post and source products, in either a public or private community, where they can then re-use the data in sending requests for quotes or purchase orders for example, all the way through the entire transaction.

According to a Standard Bank statement, this ability to inherit information from one document to the next will virtually eliminate re-work and errors due to the data being manually rekeyed into multiple documents.

L/C benefits

One of the platform's pilot users, group treasurer of UK-based retailer Woolworths Group PLC, Simon Atkinson, is quoted as saying that some of the system's benefits lie in the ability of B2BeX to allow the retailer to look at the link between the L/C and the purchase order.

"There are three important advantages with this link. First, we can introduce straight through processing. Second, orders that are amended can be sent straight through to the L/C. Thirdly, we can reduce discrepancies in documents when the supplier presents to the bank. All of these combined should mean potentially better trade terms," Atkinson told the Taiwan News.

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