Infor & DBS Bank to integrate digital trade financing

“This is an important relationship for Infor, where a common vision of data-driven financing bonds us and presses us forward,” said Gary Schneider, vice president of sales for Infor financial supply chain management. “DBS is a digital bank, based in Asia, focused on supplier funding and liquidity. Its pursuit of digital innovation and delivering greater value to supply chains, combined with our cloud-based platform and local support team around the globe, makes for a powerful partnership at a time when liquidity is a top priority for everyone.”

“We continue to accelerate the deployment of our market-leading supply chain financing and digital capabilities to ensure steady financing to SME suppliers during these times of stress. Data forms the backbone of a successful digital strategy, and its impact across multiple industries globally has been growing exponentially,” said Sriram Muthukrishnan, group head of trade product management at DBS Bank.

“Our collaboration with Infor enables greater transparency into complex supply chains and provides insights into the transaction patterns between an anchor and its ecosystem of suppliers. We leverage these insights to provide quicker and more cost-efficient financing to suppliers much earlier in the cycle, as compared to conventional post-shipment supplier financing programmes. This is especially relevant today, as we continue to operate in an environment characterised by prolonged trade disruptions and tighter credit lines, where optimal working capital management is key to survival."

The two companies' next joint programme for pre-shipment finance, expected to launch in late 2020, will utilise supply chain data as the primary conduit to assess risk and credit worthiness, as opposed to traditional models that result in the majority of suppliers being underfunded or facing challenges to access necessary capital. Infor provides extensive supply chain data, including historic and real-time milestone information on the physical movement of goods to enable a data-driven representation of a supplier's performance and credit risk.

“In the next three years, the competitive frontier in corporate lending and supply chain finance will be the creation of innovative credit risk models that banks will use to leverage corporate supply chain process data. Banks will capture and analyse events in the physical supply chain (source-to-pay, order-to-cash) in order to generate a more comprehensive and realistic representation of a company's risk profile,” said a research report from Aite Group analyst Enrico Camerinelli (The Supply Chain Bank, 2018)

DBS is a leading financial services group in Asia with a presence in 18 markets. Headquartered and listed in Singapore, DBS is in the three key Asian axes of growth: Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia. The bank's "AA-" and "Aa1" credit ratings are among the highest in the world.

Infor is a global leader in business cloud software specialized by industry. With 17,000 employees and over 67,000 customers in 178 countries, Infor software is designed for progress.

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (PC)