BofA to use Bolero trade finance platform

The alliance will provide corporates with a platform they can use across multiple banking relationships for trade finance activity and will form part of Bank of America's extensive trade services offering.

The need for multi-bank platforms has grown as corporates find it increasingly difficult to adapt business process and technology for each bank's proprietary technology. The platform will allow Bank of America customers to automate the lifecycle of instruments such as Letters of Credit, providing significant cost savings and reducing time delays associated with traditional paper based or partially electronic processes. By creating efficiency in the trade finance process, corporates can eliminate errors and manage working capital more effectively.

Paul Johnson, Senior Vice President Global Product and Strategy at Bank of America says: "Working closely with our global customers, we witnessed the growing need for a multi-bank solution to automate the trade finance process across a corporate customer's community of banks. Traditionally these platforms have been provided by large corporations, but banks must embrace multi-banking services in trade finance as an inevitable future requirement. Bank of America's alliance with Bolero illustrates our commitment to providing customers with sophisticated trade and supply chain solutions."

"We are delighted to have Bank of America join the fast growing Bolero Multi-Bank community" said Arthur Vonchek, CEO of Bolero. "This demonstrates the Bank's desire to deliver real value to its global corporate customers. As the market for multi-bank trade finance solutions grows, major banks are realising the need to support a robust standard which meets a bank's need for security, compliance and Straight Through Processing (STP), avoiding the risk that they will be forced by individual customers to build custom integration to proprietary corporate solutions."