SWIFT announces that GlobalTrade Corporation (GTC), a leading provider of innovative multi-bank trade finance solutions, is the first trade finance technology provider to integrate Alliance Lite2 for Business Applications (L2BA) with its multi-bank trade finance platform for corporates.

L2BA enables providers to combine the value of their business applications with a SWIFT connection to the financial industry. By integrating its application with L2BA, GTC offers corporates a single, cost-effective one-stop-shop to automate trade flows with their multiple banking partners – covering over 10,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries. Besides corporates, banks will also benefit from L2BA through the re-use of their established SWIFT connectivity.

“Trade Finance is one of the key priorities of SWIFT’s corporate treasury market strategy”, says André Casterman, Global Head of Corporate and Supply Chain Markets, SWIFT. “We are witnessing an increasing control of corporates on their trade finance flows; this is being achieved through centralisation, automation and the use of multi-banking trade solutions. Banks can support this by implementing SWIFT’s standards for trade and supply chain finance such as the MT 798 and ISO 20022. This is an opportunity for trade banks as the technology will help them grow their risk mitigation and financing business.”

Jacob Katsman, CEO, GTC confirms: “Our clients rely on us to provide advanced multi-bank trade finance capabilities. We recommend them to adopt SWIFT’s multi-banking channel to reach out to their banking partners as this offers the most secure and standardised communication platform.  Having now integrated SWIFT with our technology we have made implementation for clients so much easier and have enhanced our value proposition as a result.”

Per Norman, Head of Treasury and Risk Management, BillerudKorsnäs AB welcomes the news: “Automating trade flows has become a priority for us. The SWIFT-based GTC solution is very attractive as it gives us the opportunity to benefit from a full cloud set-up and a highly standardised multi-bank and secure platform. The combination of SWIFT and GTC will enable us to achieve our goal in the most cost efficient and scalable way.”

Marcus Treacher, SWIFT Board member and Chair of the Corporate Advisory Group is enthusiastic about this milestone for L2BA: “GTC has demonstrated strong support of SWIFT rules and standards and this development is the outcome of long-standing cooperation. We believe more corporates will take advantage of SWIFT's L2BA connectivity for Trade as GTC and other providers connect their platforms to SWIFT.”

Discover “SWIFT for Corporates” and “Alliance Lite2 for Business Applications” at the Sibos Corporate Forum: www.sibos.com/corporate-forum. L2BA is available for cloud application providers in different business segments, including payments, cash management, trade, securities and funds. It will be further developed to new segments and markets; banking applications and on-premises software solutions. Since its launch in September 2014, L2BA has enabled more than 75 new corporates to connect to SWIFT.