Surecomp®, the leading provider of global trade finance solutions for banks and corporates, today announced that one of its customers, Nordea Bank Abp, is being recognized as the 2020 Surecomp Global Hackathon winner, for creating a new workflow to initiate bank guarantee requests together with additional financing options.

The 5-strong team from Nordea - a Nordic universal bank with a presence in 19 countries, including its home markets Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden - developed an innovative application that can automate the request of bank guarantees, eliminating the need for paper-based applications.

Accelerating the processing of global trade transactions thus enabling faster delivery of bank guarantees and a more streamlined customer experience for the bank’s corporate customers, the app is designed to seamlessly integrate with Surecomp’s back-office trade finance processing solution IMEX, which the bank has been using since 2016.

The three-day virtual event which took place last week, saw dozens of teams gathered from across the globe. Among the competition finalists were also two of the world’s top ten banks and several leading fintechs, all focused on digitization and streamlining trade finance operations for the benefit of the bank’s customers. The winning solution will now be fully developed in a real live environment to benefit Nordea customers. Some of the other most notable included an app for supply chain finance, fraud control and know your customer (KYC).

“We are delighted to receive this recognition in the Surecomp Global Hackathon,” says Patrik Zekkar, Global Head of Trade Finance & Working Capital Management at Nordea. “As we continue our journey towards full trade finance digitization, we hope this app will really improve the service level we and many other banks are able to deliver to our customers.”

“Congratulations to Nordea for their achievement in this year’s event, we were highly impressed by their standard of innovation,” explains Tsafrir Attar, Surecomp’s VP of Digitization. “We know that the impact of COVID-19 has probably accelerated trade finance digitization by at least 5 years, so by showcasing these apps, we are hoping to raise the profile of technical innovation, to demonstrate the level of knowledge and expertise and to drive adoption.”