Both firms are looking at exploring developments of digitally-led commercial trade and supply chain finance business propositions. The new partnership will initially look at how coupling iGTB’s strong product processors with Bolero’s diversified global digital ecosystem can lead to the elimination of inefficiencies in trade transactions while at the same time boosting revenueenablement.

Manish Maakan, CEO,iGTB said, “The focus at iGTB is to work with banks in the areas of revenue growth, improvements in returns on equity and cost/income ratios, while developing tools which help banks with effective risk and compliance governance frameworks, and this has led to a number of recent large wins in trade finance/supply chain.Our partnership with Bolero International will capitalise on their expertise in trade digitisation to help reduce operational risk in an industry that is dominated by manual and inefficient processes.”

The first potential collaboration will be combining forces to validate the commercial viability of solutions creating a global secure digital marketplace for origination and distribution of trade and supply chain finance assets.

Ian Kerr, CEO, Bolero International said, "We are very excited to be collaborating with iGTB.  They share our passion for practical innovations that make supply chain trade finance safer, smarter and faster through the power of digitisation and the elimination of time-consuming manual processes.Both teams will be pooling their years of expertise to build solutions that transform the efficiency and revenue-enablement of supply chain trade finance. The benefits are potentially immense, providing banks with access to global multi-investor classes while strengthening their relationships as service providers and partners."

iGTB partnership with PPI AG 

iGTB, the transaction banking division of Intellect Design Arena Ltd, the leading B2B fintech with 21% CAGR over three years, and PPI AG, the leading software product company in Europe announced their partnership in providing advanced end-to-end integrated solutions for transaction banking localised for the needs of German and French banks.

With the average IT spent in Europe expected to increase by 6% to 9%, it is expected that growing expectations around the user experience, alongside delivering operational efficiencies will see businesses in all verticals from Europe expecting sophisticated localised payments technology from their financial service providers. This partnership will provide a local center of excellence for distribution, implementation and maintenance. The digital transformation expertise of iGTB, with its rich digital front-end product Contextual Banking Experience (CBX) and the full suite of transaction banking products (covering PCM, liquidity, collections, trade and supply chain) and the EBICS-enabled payments product suite TRAVIC from PPI are coming together to form an exciting, integrated market-ready payments platform, which is also extensible to all transaction banking products. iGTB's global experience and leading transaction banking frontend product suite will complement PPI's strong presence in Europe, in particular in Germany, Switzerland and France, and PPI's leading European end-to-end EBICS/payments product expertise, equipping banks with superb solutions & services for their SME and corporate clients. 

Commenting on the collaboration, Manish Maakan, CEO, iGTB said “The SEPA zone is seeing a marked change in attitude. Once modernising and upgrading payments processing infrastructure was seen as a regulatorymandated compliance project but now it is widely viewed as the foundation of a wave of new customer-facing enhancements. The focus has been shifting from not just concentration on STP rates but also providing sophisticated, well designed solutions with a great end-to-end user experience. Teaming up with PPI is a big step forward and underlines the commitment to our European market and recent expansion, complementing our desire to equip German- and French-speaking banks with the ability to serve their end customers more effectively - and at lower cost, especially with native local language implementation and support. This partnership also ensures iGTB's solutions can embrace the EBICS payments formats commonly used in key European countries. ”

Dr. Ing. Thorsten Volkel, Executive Board Member, PPI AG said. "The vision behind PPI's payment division is to deliver complete end-to-end payment processing capabilities for the banking industry in Europe. PPI is capable of delivering the complete process chain from access channel to payment engine towards interbank communication systems. However, we need to be equipped to face the attitude change in the market in terms of the need for digitalisation of the complete solution with ultimate focus on the front end user experience both with bank users and their client users. The partnership with iGTB will address this need by being able to offer a joint solution using iGTB's Digital Transaction Banking suite of digital products together with PPI's TRAVIC products for payments processing. This will enable PPI to have a compelling digital payments innovation offering for the local banks in Europe that will provide an end-to-end payments suite equipped with both digitalised front-end and next-gen payments product processor. We certainly aim at targeting these European markets with our offering. Both companies share a similar philosophy: delivering the best possible solution for their customers."