Our CEO Alexander Goulandris recently gave a joint presentation with Andre Casterman, SWIFT’s Global Head Corporate and Supply Chain Markets, at the SWIFT Trade and Supply Chain EMEA User Conference in London. The presentation, which took place on 21 May, focused on the digitization of corporate-to-corporate and corporate-to-bank trade flows within the framework of combining CargoDocs™ with SWIFT for Letters of Credit (L/Cs) and Bank Payment Obligation (BPO). At SWIFT’s invitation, the presenters were also joined by Deborah Selinski, Director Global Trade Channels RBS, who provided her own insights to the discussion from a bank perspective. According to a SWIFT news article covering the event, Andre Casterman, highlighted the successes achieved at the industry level during the past year: "The use of SWIFT's MT 798 and ISO 20022 innovations for trade is steadily increasing, thanks to some banks taking the lead and acting as early movers in their markets […] At SWIFT, we continue to focus on collaborative innovation, working with our certified application vendors such as BankTrade, China Systems, GTC and Surecomp, and with specific providers active in the corporate-to-corporate trade - space such as essDOCS." As reported by the same SWIFT news article, in discussing the rationale for adopting the BPO, Alexander Goulandris confirmed the increased interest among corporates in automating paper trade processes: "Electronic presentation of shipping documents allows corporates to accelerate payments, reduce demurrage and reduce courier fees. By combining our electronic bill of lading solution with the BPO payment instrument, we can provide our corporate clients with the most advanced digital solution in both corporate-to-corporate and corporate-to-bank spaces."

Click here for the entire SWIFT news article on the Trade & Supply Chain EMEA User conference

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