Standard Chartered is looking to ease the supply chain finance headache for business clients through an arrangement with the Infor Nexus Network
The Infor network transforms the traditionally manual process of data matching across multiple commercial documents including purchase orders, invoices and transport documents. This helps to speed up trade financing cycles, allowing suppliers to access capital faster and at more critical points in the transaction cycle, and as a result ensure on-time delivery of goods.
Michael Sugirin, global head of open account trade product management, Standard Chartered, says: “While large corporates have achieved some level of automation through sophisticated enterprise resource planning systems, around 80 percent of data used in matching are sourced from documents residing with external parties. This manual matching process is time-consuming, often resulting in a delay of the trade financing cycle which impacts the supplier’s ability to meet their working capital needs, most of whom tend to be small and medium-sized businesses. This strategic partnership addresses this gap and reduces capital related costs and risk from the supply chain.”
Clients referred to the Infor business cloud will benefit from connections to a network of 65,000 businesses around the world.
Sugirin says the agreement fits well with the bank's emerging markets footprint, which generates significant paper-heavy trade documents flows.