SCB online service aims to cut trade finance paperwork

SCB projects its trade-finance volume this year to expand by 20 per cent to US$80 million (Bt2.5 billion).
Trirong said trade finance was important for the country, growing by 9.8 per cent per annum over the past three years.
SCB aims to increase its share of this market by 1 percentage point, to 15 per cent, this year. However, he said it wanted to achieve this by means other than pricing.
“We believe innovative products and trade suggestions will reinforce our trade finance division,” he said.
The market leader in trade finance has a 20-per-cent share.
Trirong said its trader customers only conducted 1.5 per cent of their international transactions online, far lower than the 63 per cent rate for local commerce activities.
SCB has allocated around Bt400 million to develop SCB Trade Net, a one-stop online facility for inter-national transactions, which can slash the time for processing documents to two hours, a procedure that normally takes at least twice that time, even up to a day. One-third of the cost of this type of businesses is paperwork.
Trirong said SCB was the first Thai bank to develop one-stop online trade finance. Customers can check their credit lines and status of trade transactions in real time on a single terminal without having to contact officials. The bank will add real-time interest-rate and foreign-exchange information to Trade Net by the end of this year. SCB’s trade-finance customer base consists of 10,000 enterprises, of which about 7,000-8,000 are active customers. It anticipates that about 1,500 of its active customers will begin using Trade Net.

SMEs
“Small and medium-sized enterprises are the targeted Trade Net customers as they have higher documentation costs from con-ducting trade finance,” Trirong said.
He said SCB Trade Net would help
 clients save more than 30 per cent in costs and cut international commercial transaction times by more than half.
SCB’s revenue from trade finance is expected to grow by 15-16 per cent from the increase in active customers, he said. Moreover, the bank will work to add to its customer base those industries that are not affected by the global economic slowdown, such as foods and beverages, construction materials, and wholesale and retail.
The bank will focus on corporate customers despite the narrow margin due to fierce competition, as their trade-finance volumes are larger than those of SMEs, he added.