A GLOBAL software technology company recently held a media roundtable discussion on trends and challenges in the corporate banking sector. Transaction banking platform iGTB creates cutting-edge products and solutions that enable digital transformation in banking and insurance.

Immediately following the invitation-only executive event titled "Transformation Strategies for Transaction Banking," Intellect Design Arena Ltd. executives sat down with The Manila Times for an exclusive peek into the future of trade, supply chain finance, and cash management.

Atanu Ganguli, executive vice president and business head DTB & iColumbus.ai, iGTB Intellect; David Hennah, global head of Trade & Supply Chain Finance, iGTB; and Sachin Salian, senior vice president and global head of Marketing, Global Transaction Banking, Intellect Design Arena Limited, were on hand to connect the dots and explore what lies ahead.

Intellect Design Arena Ltd. has the world's largest cloud-native, API-led microservices-based multi-product platform for global leaders in banking, insurance, and capital markets. The global company provides digital contextualized banking, allows clients to move seamlessly between payments, cash, trade finance and supply chain finance, connects the smartphone, tablet, watch, laptop and even desktop, and delivers bank solutions for MSMEs, Multinational Companies or Financial Institutions.

"We are a global company, dedicated to servicing banks and insurance," Salian said, "Our group works specifically with corporate and commercial banks, especially those divisions that service large corporations across the globe, mid-sized businesses, and most importantly, MSMEs.

"In a nutshell, we create software products primarily around cash management, liquidity, trade finance, and supply chain finance. We have a very strong digital layer that is supported by a very robust underlying technology called EMAC.AI, which is microservices, headless architecture, and obviously AI."

"We are here in the Philippines today to primarily bring together corporate bankers, transaction banking heads, the CIOs, the CTOs, and also the buyers, the corporates, all together in a single room, and see how we can essentially scale up transaction banking in the country," Ganguli added.

"Gen AI introduced a massive shift in the overall technology outlook. Also coupled with the pandemic, the whole business model has gone through changes. We'd like to think a huge opportunity has opened up in Asia itself, and looking at the Philippines as a country, we see there is a strong trajectory for growth in the next four to five years."

Technology adoption has been made easier, especially by the millennials. They embraced digitalization transformation that effectively set aside the inertia of traditional banking to uncover new growth opportunities.

One such area of growth trajectory is in trade finance. Hennah said, "Trade finance is a business that's been around for hundreds of years. It's a very well-established business. It's also very largely paper-based, which is one of the drawbacks, and it hasn't really grown for the last 20 years. It's more of a flat line.

"In the meantime, we've seen the evolution of a new business, which has become known as supply chain finance, which is mainly about the financing of invoices in various forms such as payables finance, receivables finance, distributed finance, etc.

"In order to do that, you need to take away a lot of the pain of paper processing. So, therefore, you need state-of-the-art technology, including artificial intelligence in particular, which will support the capture of data and will support the compliance checks that are necessary on the underlying documents.

"Supply chain is a business that's digitized end to end. And I think supply chain finance can help close the trade gap rather than traditional banking. It's a relatively new concept that can help close the trade gap and make trade finance readily available to the MSME supplier. It's just the way the proposition is designed."

Digital trade finance is one of a shopping list of demands of today's traditional banks.

Ganguli added, "Everybody wants a microservices architecture. Everybody wants the things that we check-listed, our open APIs. Everybody wants data analytics. Everybody wants artificial intelligence.

"Our own ambition, as a relatively new supplier in this area, is to deliver the right state-of-the-art architecture that will enable banks to future-proof their business going forward. As you can see, the supply chain is at the opposite end of the spectrum. We're the only supplier that can satisfy those digitalization needs."

Talking about implementation timelines to capture emerging opportunities right here, right now, Ganguli reveals that the company is on track to deploy iGTB solutions with major corporate banks within the year.