Nigeria moves Trade to the Cloud with Misys and Interswitch

With calls for a diversification and deepening of the Nigerian trade sector to offer options for varied investor tastes and boosting of the economy, Thursday, June 1 2017 witnessed the launch of a Digital Cloud-hosted Trade Solution for the Nigerian Market called Misys Fusion Banking Trade Innovation Software. Powered by Interswitch’s cloud, the key targets of this proprietary software are 1st and 2nd tier banks, desiring to optimize their trade banking operations in an evolving and competitive landscape. For banks to remain viable they will need to improve in their areas of competitive advantage, namely innovating their trade finance client offerings and also essentially investing in the 3 important dimensions of their people, process and technology capabilities.

These become pertinent as some identified drivers of the revolution in global trade finance are identified as technological innovation, switches in corporate behaviour, regulatory changes and of course, accelerating market competition.

Apart from the innovative solution optimising banks’ trade operations to drive growth in domestic and cross-border trade and supply chain finance, Misys Fusion’s adaptability to the working capital needs of individual buyers and suppliers will allow clients surpass competition in the area of service quality delivery and relevant and timely product delivery, while providing a single management view of their entire trade finance business.

Other benefits of the solution include reduced operational costs, Elimination of operational risks and customer service excellence with transactions easily and efficiently routed at each stage of the transaction lifecycle. Developers of the platform offered further assurances in an era of increasing concerns of safety and online intrusions. According to them, beyond its promise of global visibility, and risk oversight across financial institutions’ entire trade finance business, there will be more attention on risk management.

Commenting about the solution, Carlos Teixera, Head of Corporate Banking within Global Solutions Consulting, Middle East and Africa at Misys said:

“Centralized trade operations combined with credit risk limit setting and watchlist integration also means this is an effective, singular and end-to-end platform for risk management. The system is remarkably flexible and can be deployed/integrated in unison with the Fusion’Banking Corporate Channels trade portal solution, or any other in-house or third party system already being run by the financial institution. Misys’ long range experience in deploying financial solutions across diverse markets guarantees a proven implementation approach that includes off-the-shelf business workflows for trade, reflecting 20 years of successful trade services implementations.”

This solution is powered by Interswitch’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform, which delivers high-end technology infrastructure – servers, storage, network and operating systems – as an on-demand service. Interswitch has built a suite of cloud services and offerings, which are designed to help businesses focus on delivering innovative products and services to their customers.

Also commenting on the solution, Interswitch’s Chief Information Officer, Babafemi Ogungbamila added that: “Businesses can leverage our over a decade and half of experience delivering infrastructure and cloud-based services. Businesses can also leverage our great relationships with the very best technology vendors in the world, so essentially, this is Interswitch and Misys coming together to deliver a compact trade banking solution hosted in the cloud, for Nigerian banks to take advantage of.”