By Jean-Francois Tapprest and Urban Ljungblom, March 2023
In our last joint article, we analysed why we.trade, a promising digital trade finance platform, failed. We concluded that, in addition to poor project implementation and modest sales efforts by the banks involved, which led to a low uptake among potential users, it came maybe ahead of its time as the pain-points it was solving were not understood well enough by the end-users.
It is not the only recent failure since MarcoPolo, a competitor to we.trade, has run insolvent at the end of February, and TradeLens, a high profile data and document-sharing platform for trade workflows, built by IBM and Maersk, closed down last November. Other initiatives, such as Contour or Komgo, are still in operation, but none so far has made a real breakthrough.
So, is the Trade Finance value chain too complex to be modernised? Will it remain forever an old fashioned process where paper is still king?
In a series of three articles, we try to foresee where the world of trade finance is evolving, we enquire on which players are likely to grasp a dominant role and we ponder on the future role of banks.
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