In line with the bank’s strategy to grow its transactional franchise in the corporate and investment banking market, trade finance and working capital solutions have been identified as key strategic levers. Confirming this commitment, Mike Thomas, Divisional Executive of Global Business in Nedbank CIB, confirmed that “the bank recently announced the launch of its new Nedbank Global Enterprise and Global Enterprise Portal, which will introduce operational efficiencies, enhance risk management controls and deliver a client experience that surpasses any competitor.”

China Systems is the world’s leading trade services technology vendor with offices throughout Europe, US, Asia, and the Middle East. It is focused on providing an integrated front-end and back-office platform catering for internal and external deployment at a domestic, regional or global level. Eximbills, their proven flagship solution, which is installed in more than 150 banks and 75 countries worldwide, can be tailored to adapt to changing real-world requirements in any business or regulatory environment for Trade Finance, Payments, and Supply Chain Finance without the need for programming modification.

Having partnered with China Systems to implement a trade platform for both online clients and bank operations staff, deploying Eximbills Enterprise (SWIFT 2017 certified platform for Trade instruments and Supply Chain Finance), along with Customer Enterprise (the China Systems portal that enables Nedbank’s clients to transact quickly and securely for Letters of Credit and Collections from the convenience of their premises), Nedbank was able to go live on import and export trade finance products in an impressive time of five months, which included a Discovery Phase.

According to Mike Thomas, “Our Global Business Unit, in conjunction with Group Technology, Corporate Shared Services, Project Management and China Systems, have exceeded all expectations and raised the bar by demonstrating their mettle in cross-functional project management. Post an intense negotiation period, the team managed to deploy this complex technology with the official ‘go-live’ date on 25 August 2017. It is a remarkable achievement, with confirmation from the vendor that this is officially a record-breaking deployment timeline achieved by any bank across the globe, placing Nedbank at the top of the podium.”

The greater project includes a progressive rollout of further trade products and functionality in the immediate term, including Guarantees and Supply Chain Finance, along with additional integrations, streamlining of business processes and technology rationalisation.

China Systems has been working continuously on a strategy of improving its business product ‘baseline’ and ‘toolkit’ offerings (for Trade Finance, Supply Chain Finance, Payments and Treasury) with a view to achieving more rapid solution deployment. This achievement of a five-month, start-to-go-live implantation of both a portal and back-end system, with integrations, ’look and feel adaptations’ and Single Sign On (SSO) for a large bank is unheard of and is proof that the strategy is successful. Digby Bennett, Regional Sales Director China Systems Middle East stated, “All projects include client-specific enhancements for integration and local regulatory processing and also changes for a bank’s internal workflow (and security), configurations, etc. This is where our rapid development tool called CS Toolkit differentiates China Systems in the technology market and has clearly provided a significant leg-up for this record implementation.”

Nedbank has installed the Global Enterprise and Global Enterprise Portal on the latest IBM and Oracle releases and with banks actively pursuing emerging technologies to re-engineer the trade value chain, the bank’s investment in best of breed platforms will ensure that Nedbank is poised to be at the forefront of such innovation.

China Systems is delighted to have added a bank of Nedbank’s stature to the impressive list of banks that already use its technology offerings and look forward to a mutually beneficial partnership.