VIDEO | Komgo’s approach to TFMS - Trade Treasury Payments

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At the Komgo Rooftop Networking Event in Singapore, Trade Treasury Payments (TTP) spoke with Baptiste Audren, Chief Revenue Officer at Komgo, about how the company is helping corporates and banks manage guarantees, letters of credit, and standbys more efficiently.

Audren explained how trade finance is still a fragmented and largely manual space, particularly when contrasted against the payments industry, which is more standardised. “A TFMS [Trade Finance Management System] is a system that allows you to manage all your off-balance sheet instruments from LCs, guarantees, standbys, and some of these large corporates do have billions of lines when it comes to these instruments,” he said. 

Komgo’s proposition to the market is to address this complexity by consolidating processes, ranging from fee calculations to synchronisation with banks and internal systems. No simple task.

The company’s footprint has grown alongside its commodities clients, with offices established in Geneva, London, Houston, and Singapore. According to Audren, global banks are now looking at Komgo as a way to standardise their fragmented back-offices. 

“What we see now is that the very big banks of this world – the HSBCs, the Standard Chartereds, the BNPs, the Citibanks – are more and more interested to get one layer of API that allows them to service all their back office around the world.” He added that the standardisation of APIs, supported by initiatives from ICC and SWIFT, is helping make this possible.

Komgo also works directly with corporates, which are under pressure to automate and reconcile faster, particularly as experienced trade finance professionals retire and younger staff lack the same level of expertise. Technology, Audren argued, can support treasury managers who may not have specialist trade finance backgrounds. 

As Singapore hosted the global trade, treasury, and commodities community with a week full of conferences and events, Audren called on practioners, saying, “Join us if you haven’t already. We have more and more products, we have a lot of things happening next year. So please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.”