IBM partners with MonetaGo for trade finance deduplication
Tech giant IBM is teaming up with fintech startup MonetaGo to address trade finance fraud, with an initial focus on South East Asia.
MonetaGo’s Secure Financing solution addresses specific risks of duplicate financing and fraudulent documents used in trade finance, with an initial deployment in India in March 2018. The service in India is used by the TReDS exchanges, commercial banks and non-bank financing companies. The Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) provides receivables financing to micro, small and medium enterprise (MSME) suppliers to large corporates in India, and utilisation of such financing has hit an all-time high during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Having established a 3 ½ year track record in India, MonetaGo announced recently its Global Secure Financing solution which counts SWIFT as a partner for worldwide deployment. It is understood that MonetaGo has been working with SWIFT for some time to provide banks access to a Trade Finance Validation Service via the bank cooperative’s Global API Gateway.
The global rollout of MonetaGo’s solution is seen as timely, following a spate of large-scale frauds in trade finance involving billions of dollars uncovered in 2020-2021 that has caused some major banks to curtail or in some cases withdraw from trade financing altogether.
