Overdue Trade Finance Digitisation Crucial for Growth - SWIFT
(10 November 2021 – EMEA) Trade digitisation and its potential benefits have long been on the agenda but while banking and finance has made significant progress in digitising customer interactions, trade remains one of the few areas that still rely heavily on manual and paper-based processes.
Advancements in technology have already sped up supply chains and brought down the cost of doing business. With better connectivity, richer data and new technology, there has never been a better time to digitise trade. For trade to be truly digitised, some challenges such as legal harmonisation, standards and interoperability remain to be addressed. One of the main challenges with trade is that we are not only looking at technology. We are looking at a complex ecosystem with a myriad of actors, rules and regulations, both across physical and financial supply chains, in multiple countries and industries.
SWIFT’s recent research note “Digitising trade: the time is now” outlines how the pandemic has magnified the vulnerabilities of manual and paper-based processes in global trade and suggests how efforts to digitise trade could reduce friction in global commerce and support economic growth.
“As the world emerges from the pandemic, trade is paramount in enabling the global economy to recover and digitisation has an essential role to play, removing the frictions that ultimately impair access to liquidity and optimisation of financing, with knock-on ramifications for business and growth” commented SWIFT Executive Director & Country Manager, Huny Garg.
“Today, SWIFT digitises more than US$2 trillion in global trade. Through common standards, identity, and security protocols SWIFT enables interoperability between thousands of banks and corporates in over 200 countries and territories. Now is the time to digitise trade, to work in collaboration with all participants to ensure a global, interoperable, and trusted trade ecosystem emerges from this defining period in history” Garg added.
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