Textile industry uses Contour in Vietnamese pilot transaction

Contour has announced a completed pilot transaction between Tainan Spinning and Century Synthetic Fiber Corporation. CTBC Bank, a founder bank of Contour, was the advising bank in the letter of credit (LC) transaction, supporting Tainan Spinning. The importer, Century Synthetic Fiber Corporation was supported by Vietnamese-based HDBank who acted as the issuing bank.

HDBank is the first Vietnamese based bank to have accomplished the full import LC transaction flow from issuance to presentation and settlement. This transaction marks the first time HDBank has utilised the network, and the first time CTBC Bank has worked with Contour introducing the network to the textile industry.

Contour says that its inaugural work with two textile companies showcases the benefits the network holds for traditional industries. Contour’s decentralised network allows all parties to have visibility of the trade while also ensuring that no single organisation - including Contour - controls all the data. This ensures that both banks, importers and exporters have improved visibility without compromising security. 

"As the world adapts to social distancing and post-COVID life, traditional methods of doing business will quickly be incompatible," said Carl Wegner, CEO at Contour. "The inefficient paper-based processes which have plagued international trade for decades are not fit for purpose. Instead, the future of trade will be without barriers, allowing collaboration across the entire trade ecosystem. The recent transaction has shown how our network can deliver for banks of varying sizes and across different industries. As we move into 2021, we aim to further these goals, delivering an inclusive trade environment for all.”

 

Billhop teams up with Visa Finland and OmaSp to target working capital in Finland 

Billhop has announced a partnership with Visa Finland and Oma Säästöpankki Oyj (OmaSp) that is designed to help Finnish businesses improve their cash flow and close any liquidity gap.

As part of the collaboration, OmaSp has released a new Visa business credit card product, the first of its kind in Finland, giving its customers benefits including access to Billhop’s service at a preferential rate when paying with an OmaSp card.

Following the launch of OmaSp’s commercial card, its cardholders are now able to improve their working capital by paying their suppliers via Billhop. When doing this, the actual cash flow effect does not occur until the payment of the card statement is due, thereby strengthening the liquidity cushion of the company. This has not previously been possible for Finnish businesses.

Billhop, which has already launched in several European markets, is a payment service that enables businesses and individuals to pay invoices with credit cards regardless of whether the end beneficiary accepts card payments or not. No onboarding of the end beneficiary is required, allowing Billhop to enable 100% of supplier payments on card instantaneously. In practical terms, this means that Finnish businesses from now on can pay virtually all invoices using their existing credit card.

 

TCMpartners and Finastra bring cloud-based trading capabilities to the sell-side

TCMpartners, a professional services organisation with a focus on treasury and capital markets, based in Latin America and Europe, has announced a cloud-based managed services partnership with Finastra, to bring a new end-to-end sales and trading experience to sell-side institutions throughout Latin America.

This software-as-a-service (SaaS) experience will allow any sales-driven financial institutions to incorporate electronic trading and capital markets managed services into their clients’ sales and trading workflows. This should benefit corporate and individual customers with low latency seamless electronic trading, access to executable foreign exchange (FX) quotes, straight-through processing and online reporting services. 

“Both TCMpartners and Finastra are committed to driving transformational change in sales organizations – helping financial institutions benefit from modern, SaaS technology with continuous updates and off-the-shelf components”, said Denise Parker, SVP, Partners and Ecosystem at Finastra. “We’re seeing increased demand for managed services from our customers. Our collaboration in delivering Treasury and Capital Markets solutions as a service will help financial institutions globally meet time-critical regulatory deadlines and scale their sell-side operations.”

 

And finally... Merry Christmas from CTMfile!

Today is our final instalment of the daily Industry News for 2020. We will be back with all the biggest treasury and finance stories, every day, from Monday 4th January 2021. In the meantime, we wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and very best wishes for the new year!