Bolero has announced that an additional eight major and regional banks are now live with the Bolero multi-bank platform demonstrating increasing uptake of this bank-neutral platform as well as the ease and speed of implementation.

Credit Suisse, ING Wholesale Banking, Dresdner Bank, Zurcher Kantonalbank, HypoVereinsbank, Fortis Bank and HSH Nordbank are all now live initially to support Glencore, the large Swiss-based physical commodities marketing company.

In addition, other banks including ABN Amro and most recently KBC have signed up for this programme and are in implementation with one of a number of key corporate clients.

The uptake of the Bolero platform by some of the world’s biggest banks demonstrates increasing demand for the technology, which has helped Bolero secure a significant cash injection under its latest round of funding.

“This is a very important programme not only for Glencore but also for our industry,” says a Glencore spokesperson. “Corporations are striving to remove inefficiencies from their supply chains and optimise the use of working capital. It is becoming increasingly important to automate corporate to bank processes over a neutral but secure platform, which provides a single dashboard for both import letters of credit (LC) applications and similarly for export LC advices. There is a clear indication that our progressive initiative is driving take-up of the Bolero platform by other large corporates, who share some of our banking partners.”

“While corporate treasurers and CFOs are increasingly driving for bank neutral automation across a range of bank trade services, until recently it has been difficult for a bank to accommodate this need without shifting the burden to the bank to support multiple proprietary solutions,” says Herwig Huysmans, general manager, trade, at KBC. “At the same time every bank is keen to protect investments in back office technology and e-banking services. From a corporate perspective it is clearly an issue to be forced to utilise the proprietary platform of each of the banks it deals with. The continued emergence of Bolero as a neutral, yet secure, multi-bank platform allows both banks and corporates to interoperate whilst avoiding these issues.”

Bolero has also announced successful completion of an internal funding round. This latest round, led by Apax Partners and Baring Private Equity Asia, will allow the company to further drive forward its successful multi-bank programme and expand its technology development facilities. This funding round is underpinned by the company’s success in the deployment of its multi-bank platform as well as by a number of significant strategic agreements by key clients, claims Bolero.

“As a founding shareholder of Bolero, we are very supportive of its adaptation to market realities,” says Leonard Schrank, CEO of Swift. “We are both the operator of Bolero’s services and now use Bolero as the technology developer for our new SwiftNet Trade Services Utility (TSU).”

“Bolero has the promise to become an important component of the next phase of bank to corporate supply chain services,” adds Alan Beattie, global head of supply chain at HSBC. “In addition, we have successfully partnered with Bolero, and one of our key global clients and some of their strategic suppliers, specifically in the development of an innovative and leading-edge solution to support structured open account visibility and automation.”