Posts Tagged ‘Marco Polo’

Baris Kalay, head of trade and supply chain finance for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) at Bank of America, caught up with TFG’s Deepesh Patel at ITFA’s Annual Conference held in Bristol, England. 

AGTB: New kid on the block. TFG heard from Daniel Gould, Deputy CEO of Anglo Gulf Trade Bank, and its new digital offering for trade finance in the UAE and MENA region. Building a trade bank from scratch without relying on legacy technologies has enabled AGTB to reimagine trade finance, building a competitive product for the corporate banking space.

Alfa-Bank and Novolipetsk Steel Company (NLMK), in cooperation with Commerzbank, Germany, and Vesuvius GmbH, Germany, have launched a pilot project of cross-border payments via the Marco Polo international trade finance network. For Marco Polo, it is the first Russian-German import-export operations financing project.

Existing systems are woefully inefficient, siloed or still paper-based and many of them have not improved for decades. The Marco Polo Network is working with Financial Institutions, Corporates and Technology & Service Providers to remove the barriers preventing them from operating at their best.

The Universal Trade Network (UTN), a project initially aimed to allow for interoperability between many of the blockchain and non-blockchain consortia and networks has been renamed and adopted by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).

Over the past 2-3 decades there have been many attempts to digitise parts of the trade and trade finance process, but it’s the complexity of trade that remains the challenge. Most successful attempts at digitisation have had to bite off a small piece of the problem and this has led to silos or what I call a ‘digital island’ phenomena.

LBBW and Commerzbank have once again executed a trade transaction between Voith and KSB SE, via the Marco Polo trade finance network, built on R3’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) platform, Corda.

In this edition of Trade Finance Talks, we’re going to be hearing from Alisa DiCaprio, Head of Trade and Supply Chain at R3 on Corda, blockchain and data exchange in trade

Euro Exim’s Compliance and Operations Head Graham Bright spoke to TFG on their decision to join other global Ripple participants for the first project, namely using the xCurrent service where… read more →

From Xenocurrency to Yield, Voltron to UCP, we’ve got you covered in Part 2 (N to Z) of our Trade Finance A to Z series. An A to Z of… read more →

Do you know why AI is poised to disrupt international trade? What on earth is a borrowing base? In this two part series, we took a moment to demystify some… read more →

December 2018 marks the end of a year of volatility, technological breakthroughs and geopolitical tension. No matter where in the world you are, protectionist policies, unpredictable trade wars and unprecedented… read more →

An interview with Vittorio De Angelis, Executive Chairman at Velotrade. The invoice financing market has been driven by growing European countries with an annual organic growth of around 10% per… read more →

The world of trade is shifting. Traditionally it’s simple; manufacturers develop, exporters ship, banks fund and insurers cover. This is changing. Manufacturers and exporters are integrating entire supply chains, online… read more →