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MonetaGo has announced it will work with banking technology giant Oracle Financial Services to introduce fraud prevention tools across its trade and supply chain finance offering. 

MonetaGo’s fraud registry system assesses whether trade documents may have been falsified or tampered with, or whether a company has attempted to obtain finance more than once for a single trade transaction. 

The Singapore-headquartered technology company revealed on February 17 that the system, Secure Financing, would be made available as part of Oracle’s cloud-based supply chain finance solution, initially in the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific regions. It expects to expand usage to Europe and the Americas at a later date. 

“Fraud is, unfortunately, a pervasive problem in supply chain finance and meaningful action is needed to combat the risks and detrimental effects brought about by bad actors,” Neil Shonhard, chief executive of MonetaGo, tells GTR. 

“A fraud registry is a secure global utility to reduce business and economic risk and costs associated with fraud by enabling cross-border and cross-document checks on information supplied by borrowers, mitigating the risk of multiple financings or the use of falsified or altered information.” 

The company’s system extracts data from various documents, including invoices, warehouse receipts, bills of lading and air waybills. 

It uses this data to create a digital “fingerprint”, which can be compared against data from other lenders to detect discrepancies or duplicate financing attempts. 

Oracle’s supply chain finance solution, launched in 2020, is used by lenders to streamline and automate transactions while improvising visibility by capturing data from scanned documents such as invoices. 

The partnership comes as lenders seek more effective ways of tackling fraud, both in the traditional trade finance space and in supply chain finance. 

“The risk and cost of fraud most often affects SMEs and MSMEs – the backbone of growing economies, particularly in developing regions,” Shonhard says. 

Initiatives are underway to make better use of technology in detecting potential illicit activity, including fraud registries in several jurisdictions. 

Singapore’s banking association announced last week that its Trade Finance Registry, a fraud prevention tool developed by MonetaGo that has been operational since mid-2023, has been bolstered by the introduction of a real-time verification system for bills of lading. 

However, trade finance experts have called for greater industry-wide collaboration to ensure registries can operate across international borders. 

“The collaboration and shared responsibility of regulators, central banks, multilateral development banks and technology providers to reduce lending risk and bridge the gap of financial inclusion will have a transformative outcome for this sector,” Shonhard says. 

“A registry must also be interoperable to allow usability across jurisdictions and other common IT systems, due to the cross-border nature of supply chain finance.”