Success Stories
Creating an end-to-end Trade Portal
Customer
Customer is the world's leading emerging markets bank. It employs 30,000 people in over 500 offices in more than 50 countries in the Asia-Pacific Region, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the United Kingdom and the Americas.
Business Context
The bank wanted to re-invent itself in the area of trade processing and outgrow its traditional role of just being an intermediary. It aimed to become a trade facilitator and in the process, create for itself a niche market space by transcending customary banking vistas. There was an immediate need to create an end-to-end trade portal that would be highly secure, scalable and user-friendly to shorten trade cycle times, to bring in higher process efficiency and reduce the cost and time involved.
- The application was primarily expected to play a path-breaking role in terms of helping the bank transform its service line from being a traditional banking services provider to being a holistic and all encompassing trade solutions facilitator
- HCL was expected to provide a wide range of services and serve as a single window by creating an integrated supply chain and trade finance portal.
- This online platform was required to support a composite portfolio of trade-related products and services resulting eventually in pronounced flexibility to interface with the internal systems of the bank's partners without any further reinvesting in additional hardware or software.
- The application was to be productized so that it could be sold to other banks in its original form, requiring minimal customizations. It was to be heavily parameterized to facilitate easy customization for different Private Label Exchanges
- The application needed to interface with other back-end applications of the bank, seamlessly using standard messages
- HCL was involved in the development of some of the core modules of the trade portal, a secure online environment to conduct and manage end-to-end integrated trade finance and supply chain management activities entirely over the Internet
- The portal integrated supply chain and trade finance portal that provided the requisite capability to combine the key areas involved in the process of international trade
- The crowning glory of the offered system was its efficacy in integrating, automating and streamlining a multitude of common trade financing processes into a shared electronic environment
- Customers were provided with the capability to exchange data with the various stakeholders in a more automated and controlled way irrespective of the underlying system types
- PO Grouping Service
- Multiple purchase orders consolidated into a single L/C application
- Trade Banking Services
- Provides a gateway to an extensive range of online trade banking services
- Management Information Reports
- Tracks all the involved B2BeX transactions and activities
- The solution improves the efficiency of the trade cycle by automating routine tasks and improving the speed and accuracy of communication between a Bank and its trading partners
- The trade portal can interface with any existing back office or ERP system as well as any major EDI network to establish a seamless communication channel between all of customer's trading parties
The time required for transitioning existing customers of the Bank to this new platform was significantly less, thus benefiting the Bank greatly in terms of moving them quickly to an application of lower operating cost
