Supplier management is an aspect of trade finance that addresses how a bank onboards and services its network of buyers and global suppliers. They often number in the thousands and have configurations specific to their regions. It's vital to have suppliers set up properly to ensure funding gets to where it is needed on time to keep the transaction moving. Trade finance organizations have dozens of operational tools and processes to make sure information and funds flow seamlessly, but it's a paper-intensive, manual process to manage all of the variants.

Trade finance is still a highly manual process. Why? The onboarding process varies from buyer to buyer, supplier network to supplier network. Is the bank onboarding a single supplier? A single buyer? An enterprise organization with a group of suppliers? Is the customer new to the bank or existing? Do they require full KYC?

These unique factors lead to hundreds of permutations that a bank’s relationship managers must track and manage.

When onboarding is complete, they also manage the ongoing relationship. Up until now, there hasn't been a technology solution that's agile enough to orchestrate these differences efficiently.

In a nutshell, the organizational complexity of the supplier management ecosystem has created a massive administrative burden.

Trade finance solutions are third-party enabled, so their operations teams have compiled dozens of different platforms and partnerships that include financial and operational tools to manage onboarding and servicing.

Information sharing isn’t well organized and requires manual communication. Since trade finance teams can’t aggregate all of the buyer/suppliers' experiential data across these systems, operational insights are limited or skewed.

Siloed systems require heavy annual investments to maintain and provide limited visibility into the journey for relationship managers, clients and the suppliers themselves. Teams struggle to ensure customers have great experiences.

OvationCXM has worked with financial institutions for a decade, so we have the ecosystem connectors, the security and the banking expertise to manage trade finance journeys specifically. Our platform was built to infuse real-time visibility and easier communication into complex customer experience interactions that require a lot of different stakeholders. Since trade finance teams count these problems as their biggest obstacles, OvationCXM is a natural solution.

OvationCXM provides agility, automation and efficiency, visibility and insights to trade finance teams with tools that build, manage and then optimize supplier journeys.

1. We provide a journey builder that lets teams create, edit and deploy detailed buyer/supplier journeys in a cloud-based platform. Then we provide an easy way for teams to handle variants that allow for the jurisdictional and geographical questions that create different paths.

2. Once journeys are configured, our platform gives teams a single interface to manage the entire experience from end to end along with a client-facing portal to check on real-time journey progress. They can learn where they are in any given journey, what documentation is expected next and what is needed to move from A to B.

3. Lastly, our platform optimizes the journeys by using the data from every single interaction, across all jurisdictions, products and services to uncover friction or find opportunities to automate tasks through integrations or APIs.