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Rapidly approaching its fourth anniversary of delivering online trade finance sourcing solutions, LTP Trade has recently unveiled the latest release of its award-winning technology, Trade Edge, to corporate clients.

Speaking from LTP Trade’s London offices, head of delivery, Michelle Rothuysen, explained to GTR why she is so excited about this latest release:

“At LTP Trade we are in a very fortunate position where we are able to continually enhance our product and service offering in direct response to our clients” feedback. The challenge with version 4 was to introduce the new features requested while allowing our diverse client base to retain the flexibility of choice that Trade Edge delivers them. I believe we have succeeded and that this release sees our clients” better than ever equipped with a set of e-tools for managing their customers” sales finance requirements and for arranging risk cover with their financial partners.

“In the previous release of Trade Edge we introduced features that enabled clients to structure “private transactions”. Basically the client selects the banks that they would like to request provide terms for their financing transactions, the terms are submitted by sealed bid and the client is then able to exercise business discretion in choosing on what basis the transaction is awarded. This allows the client to consider factors such as quality of service, physical proximity, reciprocity, or language compatibility issues over and above the price provided, and to easily communicate their decision on awarding transactions with their banks. While open auctions (one in which the banks can see the terms provided and where price is the sole determination of success) appear to result in the most competitive prices quoted, this past year has shown that these other factors are as important for clients and the majority of the users of Trade Edge now choose to conduct “private transactions”.”

Building on these features with version 4, blue chip corporations now have even more flexibility and control over how they manage their processes. Over the last year most of these corporations have chosen to use their Trade Edge technology to establish online processes whereby they predominantly source their trade finance from their preferred lenders. This enables the corporation to benefit from the efficiency and internal transparency of a systematic process while clearly working within the corporation’s predetermined central finance policy.

With this latest release, users can structure their Trade Edge so that they can create private online lists of their organisation’s preferred lenders and relationship managers such that only that corporate has access to those banks for inclusion in their financing requests.

This concept of segregated bank lists coupled with some of the new messaging features Trade Edge offers is enabling LTP’s clients to use Trade Edge to source all forms of customer financing online from their financial partners, and not just LC confirmations or traditional forfaiting transactions.

The ability to upload documents with messages together with the ability to message colleagues within the corporate or bank over a secure platform will also assist in making negotiations and settlement communication more efficient for both the corporations and their banks.

“This is not to say that we no longer see clients for whom the concept of “reach” is still most important at any point in time, whether it’s for finding any bank who can assist with a particular risk or whether it’s for finding banks who are most price competitive in a new area of business,” says James Parsons, director at LTP. “For these clients, version 4 of Trade Edge still provides a simple and efficient means to quickly identify the right banks to work with for the right transactions.”

“The best news is of course that Trade Edge is a hosted web-application licensed to corporations for a flat monthly fee and that as such, these advancements in technology come at no extra cost to Trade Edge users,” he adds.