Source: SmartStream
SmartStream Technologies, the financial Transaction Lifecycle Management specialist, today announced that Chinese firm Weihai City Commercial Bank has successfully implemented TLM Trade Finance to manage its international letters of credit and guarantees business processes.
As part of its growth strategy, Weihai City Commercial Bank has expanded its client services to include international settlement business. As a result, it required a new trade finance system to manage these processes and after examining the market for potential solutions, approached SmartStream's local partner Brilliance Technology. Impressed by their expertise and TLM Trade Finance's security and stability, Weihai City Commercial Bank selected Brilliance to implement the SmartStream solution.
The project was rapidly completed and within three months TLM Trade Finance was processing international letters of credit and guarantees documentation. This has enabled Weihai City Commercial Bank to grow significantly to become the second largest commercial bank offering trade finance services in the Shandong Province.
Mr Qin Haodong, Head of International Operations at Weihai City Commercial Bank, commented: "We're delighted with this project delivered by Brilliance, which has enabled us to build a significant new line of business from scratch in a short period of time. With TLM Trade Finance we have a robust foundation to continue expansion of our international trade finance business while implementing best practice processes that reduce errors, lower risk and ensure efficient use of our internal resources. The SmartStream solution has helped us enhance our competitive advantage with a very high quality, efficient, highly scalable platform."
Mr Zhang Yansheng, CEO of Brilliance, added: "Working with these types of city commercial banks in trade finance is a new area of business for Brilliance. There are increasing number of city commercial banks experiencing rapid business and organisation expansion. As a result, these banks need a high quality trade finance solution to support their operations and streamline business processes to achieve efficiency and competitiveness. This success with Weihai City Commercial Bank is a good start for our new strategy and Brilliance will continuously and actively improve its trade finance solution to serve the evolving needs of the city commercial banks."
Christian Schiebl, Executive Vice President at SmartStream, commented: "We are delighted that Weihai City Commercial Bank selected TLM Trade Finance for this project to deliver a significant new line of business. SmartStream's TLM Trade Finance enables them to reduce risk and cost by automating all the routine banking processes involved in the provision of international trade services. This was a challenging project due to the client's need to have a solution running quickly and Brilliance has done a fantastic job in supporting Weihai City Commercial Bank throughout the processes to deliver the project on time."