Competitor analysis

Trade Finance

There are a number of companies that have attempted to provide solutions to improve the trade finance industry.

Almost all of them have attempted this by creating software solutions to help connect borrowers with banks, and help the banks to be more effective at onboarding their customers and processing trades.

International payments

There are many widely known and highly successful companies that have focused on improving the international payments industry:

Each of these are mainly based on traditional payment rails in the back end, achieving improvements by optimising the rails used depending on the corridor, and aggregating payments to achieve improved pricing. Significantly, despite using third parties in the back end, they retain control of the customer journey.

The majority of these firms focus on originating payments from Western markets. All focus on only the payment, and do not participate in financing or any other part of the transaction- with the exception of Ebury who offer unsecured credit to e-commerce importers from the UK, EU, Australia, Canada and Hong Kong.

Supply chain finance

Supply chain finance has also seen a number of recent entrants.

Notably, most of these took a different approach to the trade finance new entrants and directly handled the end-to-end customer experience and/or financed deals, rather than facilitating workflows for banks.

There are key lessons that can be learned from new entrants in the trade finance, international payments, and supply chain finance industries:

• Control the end-to-end customer experience vs. providing technology to help incumbents service customers better

• Directly offer credit on your platform vs. acting as an introducer for borrowers to third party lenders

Supply chain finance and international payments has some highly successful new entrants. International / trade finance does not yet.