DBS Inks Digital Trade Financing Partnership

The bank will work with industry cloud software provider Infor to integrate digital trade financing capabilities into global supply chains.

Under the partnership, the two sides will use innovative supplier financing tools, as well as Infor’s rich physical and financial supply chain data to bring new opportunities to fund suppliers and help reduce supply chain risk and friction, DBS said in a statement on Thursday.

The first program under the partnership provides a faster and more cost-efficient digital trade financing to suppliers in an apparel company’s supply chain ecosystem, which comprises mostly small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The next program, planned for late 2020, aims to improve the pre-shipment finance by using supply chain data as the primary conduit to assess risk and creditworthiness.

Infor’s Nexus platform has more than 68,000 businesses, including market leaders in aerospace, healthcare delivery, automotive suppliers, industrial distributors, as well as global banks, retailers, hotel brands, luxury brands, and more.

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, DBS’ Sriram Muthukrishnan said about the partnership.

The bank’s group head of trade product management noted that quicker and more cost-efficient financing to suppliers provided earlier in the cycle, as compared to conventional post-shipment supplier financing programs, is especially relevant today, given the environment characterized by prolonged trade disruptions and tighter credit lines, where optimal working capital management is key to survival.