A Double Invitation to Act

Dear Standardised Trust community followers and all others interested of Trade Finance digital transformation. It is now time to show some concrete results of the Standardised Trust community active members’ work done for some months collectively.

We decided to strive into the semantic model creation for the bank guarantees. A model that can be used by any vendor, customer, standards body, regulator etc. for defining an interoperable business and data model. We believe the new, digital world of Trade Finance not to be based on one single monolithic platform or system and therefore a common language is needed to make data and documents based on that semantically solid data available easily for any system or process needing it.

We have reached now a level in our model where the basic model is functional and enables further standardisation and harmonisation of any bank guarantee case. The model is based on ISO 20022 but has been already expanded to embrace possibility to use standard text templates, market practice rules and detailed coding instead of vast areas of free text. Please, also note that the model at this moment applies only the application of the bank guarantee, and the other steps’ semantic model in the guarantee life-cycle will be designed and defined later. These steps will include issuance, amendments and the claim.

You can download the first simple use case (rental guarantee based on rental agreement) and the generic semantic model for your review. And here comes the two invitations:

  1. feel free to comment and amend the semantic model with your point-of-views you see it is missing or needing changes
  2. come along to Standardised Trust community by informing your interest to harri.rantanen(at)seb.fi as we are welcoming all volunteers to contribute to our common work,

You can easily see us being in the very beginning of the journey, but there is a definite need for this type of semantic model design. We hope being able to offer this crucial building block for others to develop Trade Finance more digital and easier to use for all needing stakeholders globally.

Photo by Matthew Guay on Unsplash