Ngulminthang Lhanghal - Financial Expert

Absa CIB is positioning itself at the forefront of digital developments by being a part of Contour’s digital trade finance network. Many of Africa’s trade transactions are manual and paper-based, which slows down trade growth and creates another layer of complexity and costs. Absa CIB’s clients will now have access to Contour’s digital Letter of Credit (LC), which reduces the process of presenting documents from an average of 5-10 days to under 24 hours. Digital developments are a big part of addressing challenges and creating access to new markets. In Africa, digitisation is critical to the success of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), a flagship project that aims to boost intraAfrica trade by 52.3 percent and expand the size of the continent’s economy to US$29 trillion by 2050. With a presence in 15 countries from Botswana to Zambia, the Johannesburgbased diversified financial services group is banking on innovation to drive sustainable growth. Digital developments can...

Trade is the engine of the global economy, but trade financing is complex and traditionally reliant on paper. One pain point for many financial institutions has been the lack of a network to support collaborative workflows within the trade ecosystem, and a lack of interoperability between solutions. Surecomp today (March 16) announced that it is partnering with Contour, one of the global digital trade finance networks, as part of a collaborative vision to drive the digital transformation of trade finance across financial institutions. Surecomp has over 35 years of expertise in digitising trade finance processes and its integration with Contour’s decentralised network of banks and corporates will provide users with a fully integrated end-to-end trade service solution. Through the collaboration with Surecomp’s trade finance platform RIVO, Contour’s member banks will be able to access digital Letter of Credit workflows directly on Surecomp’s back-office applications, providing straight-th...