Commodity trade finance blockchain platform komgo has hired Natalia Kasyanova as a sales lead, effective immediately.

She reports to komgo’s head of sales, Baptiste Audren, and will be based in London when she moves from Geneva at the end of the month.

Kasyanova makes the switch to komgo after more than seven years working in commodity finance roles at various banks.

Most recently, she served for two-and-a-half years at MUFG Bank, as a vice-president for commodity finance.

Prior to this, she had a five-year stint at ABN Amro, serving for four years as senior associate for agri commodities.

Speaking about Kasyanova’s hire, a komgo spokesperson tells GTR that she is responsible for helping the platform realise growth and usage targets for all of its products this year.

Having been founded as an independent venture in August 2018 to digitise and streamline commodity trade finance processes, komgo was commercially launched later that year, releasing a letter of credit (LC) product and a KYC module.

Now the platform has four separate products. One of these, known as “konsole”, allows banks and corporates to manage all their trade finance exchanges in one platform.

It covers a wide range of functionality, including letters of credit, standby letters of credits, documentary collections and guarantees.

With its “market” product, komgo users can manage all risk cover, confirmation, discounting and treasury activities with multiple banks in one place.

The platform’s know your customer (KYC) product, known as “check”, aims to simplify the onboarding and renewal process by bringing all KYC exchanges and documentation into one system, while also reducing manual touch points by automating data collection and integration with other systems.

Meanwhile “trakk” works to minimise fraud and falsification risks, by allowing users to stamp, trace and authenticate digital documents.

By stamping, users can sign specific activities on a document such as “certify” or “finance”, a process which komgo says builds a unique and immutable audit trail behind digital documents.

The platform has 15 shareholders made up of a mix of corporate and financial players, which includes Kasyanova’s former employer, MUFG Bank.

ABN Amro, BNP Paribas, Citi, Crédit Agricole, Gunvor, ING, Koch Supply & Trading, Macquarie, Mercuria, Natixis, Rabobank, Shell, SGS and Société Générale are the other backers.