Standard Chartered Bank has entered into a strategic partnership with GlobalTrade Corporation (GTC) to become one of the first international banks to offer GTC’s innovative @GlobalTrade™ multibank trade finance platform to clients in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This partnership will leverage Standard Chartered’s unique network footprint and GTC’s multi-bank technology coupled with SWIFT connectivity to meet the trade finance needs of clients across Asia, Africa and the Middle East more efficiently and effectively.

Michael Vrontamitis, Global Head, Trade, Standard Chartered, said, “With rapid technological advancements, it is important for us to continue to support our clients in digitising their supply chain ecosystem and  the resulting trade finance flows by exploring new ways and solutions to meet their changing needs. This partnership with GTC will allow us to better support our clients’ entire guarantee management business in a seamless and integrated fashion across Asia, Africa and the Middle East.”   

Corporates typically have a large number of banking partners to help service their varied trade payment instruments and currently this would require them to transact through multiple proprietary banking channels and use application forms from different banks. This often creates inefficiency when dealing with different bank systems, different application forms and variety of formats. Consolidation of reports across multiple banks and business untis are also a time consuming process which can be reduced through the use of a multibank trade finance platform.

“We are delighted to partner with Standard Chartered to leverage their deep understanding of the markets and configure our solutions to suit client needs. As the first provider to allow seamless SWIFT connectivity through our integration with SWIFT L2BA (Alliance Lite2 for Business Applications), corporates can easily migrate their existing business from multiple banks to our @GlobalTrade Platform without requiring banks to sign up as long as they support MT798 connectivity. This allows banks to efficiently automate their trade flows and service the needs of their corporate clients,” said Jacob Katsman, Chairman & CEO, GlobalTrade Corporation.

The partnership with GTC is expected to provide Standard Chartered clients who need multi-bank electronic Guarantees capabilities to access GTC’s @GlobalTrade Platform.