Citizens Bank in trade finance tech revamp with Finastra and Infosys
Finastra signs new trade finance tech client, progresses with blockchain
US-based Citizens Bank will implement a new trade finance solution, Fusion Trade Innovation from Finastra. Infosys will be the implementation partner for this project.
On the way out is the legacy Banktrade system from specialist provider Complex Systems Inc (CSI), FinTech Futures understands.
Finastra says Citizens picked its Fusion Trade Innovation “for its end-user experience, ability to support all trade products, capacity to integrate with downstream systems through open APIs and its high level of configurability”.
Michael Cummins, head of treasury solutions at Citizens Bank, says Finastra met the bank’s “demand for a strategic partner that could provide other corporate banking solutions, such as syndicated lending and supply chain finance”.
Citizens and its corporate clients will access integrated trade finance capabilities via FinCloud, Finastra’s private cloud solution.
Citizens is one of the oldest and largest financial institutions in the US, with $153.5 billion in assets. Headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, Citizens offers a broad range of retail and commercial banking products and services to individuals, SMEs, middle-market companies, large corporations and institutions. It has a network of 3,300 ATMs and 1,150 branches across 11 US states.
In the blockchain news
Meanwhile, Finastra’s Fusion LenderComm, a blockchain-based solution, is now live and commercially available.
LenderComm is an app on R3’s Corda platform for financial institutions operating in the syndicated lending market and using Finastra’s Fusion Loan IQ system.
The solution enables financial institutions acting as agents to publish loan data to the ledger and extend self-service capabilities to lenders. Through their own portal, agents can define and then publish lender-specific deal position data to Fusion LenderComm, so individual lenders can drill down into the data without needing to query positions by phone, fax or email, as is typical today.
“Fusion LenderComm digitises communication with lenders,” Finastra explains, “driving efficiencies in the process, saving agents time and money, and eliminating operational risk”.
Frédéric Dalibard, head of digital for corporate and investment banking at Natixis – one of the banks taking part in the last year’s pilot – describes the initiative as “groundbreaking”.
“By allowing the sharing of syndicated loans position data more efficiently between loan agents and participants, Fusion LenderComm addresses a key pain point by automating the costly manual processes traditionally involved in such sharing of information,” he adds.
David E. Rutter, CEO at R3, says the project is “an enormous milestone for blockchain”.
“As the first CorDapp to go live on Corda, Fusion LenderComm is a true example of how inefficient and time-consuming processes can be transformed through the power of blockchain technology,” he states.
