NBAD Private Bank (Suisse) has selected a new technology platform to support its commodity and structured trade finance team in Geneva.

NBAD has implemented Trac (Trade Risk Active Control), a collateral management system from Micro Informatique & Technologies (MIT).

Paul Cohen Dumani, MIT’s general manager tells GTR that “NBAD is developing its structured trade commodity finance activity, and “needs a proper system to ensure the reliability of data stored in the system”.

“The system makes a clear distinction of the roles involved in the activity whether we are talking about relationship managers, credit risk managers and top managers; each role is assigned with particular rights and constraints in the application, a must in terms of audit prerequisites,” Dumani says.

“The use of a tool will facilitate the bank’s decision-making process for financing amounts up to seven or eight digits. NBAD will also benefit from the input of prestigious existing Trac customers such as Natixis and Banque Cantonale de Genève that have seriously contributed to improve the system.”

Trac enables banks’ front-office (relationship managers), middle-office (credit risk managers) and top managers to monitor their risks appropriately. It was designed to replace the frequently-used Excel spreadsheet in the trade commodity finance sector.

The Trac system establishes the global economic position of a customer at a given time; the position is then calculated on the spreadsheet by consolidating data manually from heterogeneous sources. The global economic position supports the decision-making process of a relationship manager or a credit committee when deciding whether or not to finance, MIT says.

Calculating the customer’s position can be done by aggregating data coming from a traditional trade finance back-end system, and from a core banking system that supplies information on customers’ account balances.

Simon Durrance, chief operating officer at NBAD says: “We’ve been working now for four years with MIT on the back-end part of our trade finance business, and we are satisfied with our partnership with them. So it made sense to adopt MIT’s middle/front system knowing our ambition to develop commodity finance.”

NBAD Private Bank (Suisse) is a wholly-owned private banking subsidiary of the National Bank of Abu Dhabi (NBAD).