Digitising trade: the time is now
Trade Finance Global sat down with SWIFT’s Louise Taylor-Digby and discussed a variety of trade digitization topics including their partnership with MonetaGo. Hear more about our relationship to create the first-ever global solution to duplicate financing fraud in the latest episode of ‘Trade Finance Talks, Digitizing Trade: The Time is Now'
World trade is central to economic growth and as we emerge from the pandemic, trade is paramount in enabling the global economy to recover. Is the time really now, for digitising trade, and how can advance the dialogue to reduce friction, costs and risk?
We’ve discussed trade digitisation and its many facets for some time now, but the pandemic has now rendered this critical, potentially a tipping point for scalable progress in digitisation.
But it’s not easy. Digitising a complex ecosystem involving myriad actors, rules and regulations, sprawled across both physical and financial supply chains in multiple countries and industries is a challenge.
Overview of SWIFT
SWIFT is how the world moves value every day, across over 200 countries through trade, payments, FX and securities connecting over 11,000 institutions and 4 billion underlying accounts within those institutions. In addition to SWIFT’s core objective of enabling efficient communications for the financial world, SWIFT also have a suite of value-added services around the platform like a global KYC registry, data analytics propositions and financial crime solutions. However, it’s not just about having a technology platform to pass.
Furthermore, SWIFT plays a leading role in standardisation. There’s an awful lot of effort that goes into bringing the financial services community together at global, regional and local levels to shape market practices, to define standards and define rulebooks. SWIFT remains a neutral infrastructure provider, helping the industry to innovate and to deploy new solutions.
Lastly, SWIFT have a history of working with third-party partners, for instance, the newly announced SWIFT certified application providers and, most recently SWIFT’s partnership with MonetaGo partners to create the first-ever global solution to duplicate financing fraud.
SWIFT’s objectives are very simple to enable frictionless transactions and foster a collaborative platform for new ideas to thrive.
