Trade Finance: Buyer/Supplier Management

Summary

Supplier management, a major aspect of a bank’s trade finance operations, is a paper-intensive, highly regulated customer journey. It involves dozens of disconnected technologies, manual processes, regional regulations and specifications, and suppliers and buyers from around the world. 

Banks still manage this vital line of business with siloed teams and systems and lots of paper, leading to duplication of effort, communication gaps, inconsistent processes, and human error. If some of this effort can be handled with technology, it will lead to lower costs, faster supplier onboarding and a better experience.

The Challenge

Operating in a highly regulated industry, a large commercial bank struggled to manage a vast network of suppliers and buyers within its trade finance ecosystem. Account managers oversee thousands of suppliers across more than 50 countries, all with regional nuances. 

The bank’s trade finance team navigates between dozens of aging and siloed technologies, relying on manual processes and physical documents. Regional differences complicate what’s already an inconsistent, fragmented process.  These manual processes are limiting growth, increasing cost-to-serve, widening control gaps, and hindering a clear path to scale. 

The result? Slow business enablement that throttles growth, creates weak operating leverage and provides insufficient risk controls that result in blind spots. 

Problems With Complicated Trade Finance Networks

• Delayed supplier/buyer onboarding 
• Slow, manually-intensive servicing
• High operating costs 
• Human error intensifies potential risk
• No self-service capability for suppliers/buyers

“Supplier Management is an ideal customer experience to transform through journey orchestration and ecosystem connectors as most teams are working out of dozens of disparate legacy systems that require manual oversight and massive annual investment.” - Tyler Gerber, OvationCXM

The Solution

OvationCXM’s full suite of CX management technology introduces a standardized orchestration layer for journeys, addressing the complexity and diversity of origination channels by allowing designs to be created once and reused everywhere. This approach to journey management aims to solve for today’s low operating leverage, enabling volume scaling without adding headcount

Standardize and automate supplier journey processes 

Adopting OvationCXM’s no-code Journey Builder, the bank can define a foundational supplier journey flow and then customize specific steps, tasks and automations by region and supplier, all with a simple drag and drop editor. 

Outcomes: Streamlined onboarding. Consistent process. Reduced human error. Higher efficiency. Increased supplier satisfaction.

Introduce a self-service portal for faster onboarding and servicing

OvationCXM’s customer portal is a digital front door for suppliers to complete onboarding requirements online, and see real-time status updates, dashboards and reporting on their activity.

Outcomes: Fewer communication gaps. Increased supplier satisfaction. Reduced support volume and cost.

Enable enterprise data sharing with 360-degree buyer-seller profiles 

OvationCXM’s Ecosystem Connectors aggregate real-time data from separate bank systems to create a unified supplier profile. It eliminates redundant data stores and the need to jump between multiple systems. 

Outcomes: Greater efficiency and time savings. Improved employee experience. Faster time to resolution.

Provide Journey Analytics for comprehensive oversight

Powerful analytics provide cross-business visibility, giving compliance teams an immediate view of all activity and highlighting trends and opportunities to optimize.

Outcomes: Real-time oversight. Improved compliance. Enhanced risk insight.

With OvationCXM, banks finally have the tools to overcome legacy systems' limitations, siloed teams and a paper-intensive trade finance function. Our single journey orchestration layer and a unified way of working brings together every trade finance journey, for faster speed to activation and more streamlined operations.  Read more about how we orchestrate trade finance CX.