TASConnect looks to address Vietnam’s underserved US$35 billion supply chain finance market

TASConnect, a SaaS supply chain fintech platform incubated through SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, is looking to address Vietnam’s underserved supply chain finance market, which is forecasted to reach US$35 billion by the end of 2024.

“Riding on the tailwind of government efforts to digitise processes and improve the sourcing of accurate data, TASConnect will work with Vietnamese financial institutions, MNCs and regional banks to enhance Vietnam’s supply chain finance market,” said Kingshuk Ghoshal, co-founder and CEO, TASConnect. “TASConnect’s solution, which digitalises transactions between corporations and their trading partners, helps companies to expand their scale and scope of supply chain financing without incurring high capital expenditure on IT or human resources.”

Vietnam’s gross domestic product faces a 70% financing gap, even as the economy is benefiting from recent shifts in the global supply chain. This has led more Vietnamese conglomerates and MNCs to demand innovative solutions to unlock trapped liquidity in accounts payable and receivable, so they can scale better into cross-border supply chains.

TASConnect’s bank-agnostic SaaS supply chain finance platform is ready-to-deploy and easy to configure to suit diverse client business models and industries. The fintech’s solution unlocks value for organisations by enhancing efficiencies in accounts payable and receivable transactions, enabling access to increased funding sources, automating complex workflows, thereby giving businesses greater control of their processes. TASConnect offers holistic, customisable and multi-funder solutions for accounts payable and accounts receivable transaction throughout the supply and distribution chain. The fintech also provides value-added services beyond digitalisation and working capital, including, Know Your Customer checks, payments and foreign exchange conversion services, capabilities that are provided by third party solutions providers. Since the company’s launch in February 2022, TASConnect has integrated with large enterprises and regional banks, handling over 250,000 transactions while achieving a gross transaction value of over US$13 billion up to date.

“TASConnect’s mission is to democratise working capital finance,” Ghoshal said. “Unlike conventional bank offerings that are anchored on secured lending and legacy commercial credit processes, that lack seamless digital onboarding and servicing models, TASConnect offers an easy-to-deploy solution that can be customized for a wide variety of businesses.”

Large MNCs can leverage TASConnect to connect their value chain ‘last-miles’ to wider pools of funding sources to scale their supply chain networks sustainably. TASConnect’s platform provides increased visibility of commercial trade data, which allows traditional financiers to make better credit decisions when offering supply chain financing solutions.

 

 

About TASConnect
Headquartered in Singapore, Trade and Supply Chain Connect (TASConnect) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Standard Chartered Bank and incubated through SC Ventures – the Bank’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm.  

We are a leading technology solution provider for trade and supply chain finance automation, which gives organisations and their value-chain partners better access to liquidity, along with end-to-end digitalization, visibility, and control of their trade ecosystem. At TASConnect, we are firm believers in the principles of co-creation and collaboration with our clients.  
For more information, please visit www.tasconnect.com. Follow TASConnect on LinkedIn.

 

About Standard Chartered
Standard Chartered is a leading international banking group, with a presence in 59 of the world’s most dynamic markets and serving clients in a further 64. Our purpose is to drive commerce and prosperity through our unique diversity, and our heritage and values are expressed in our brand promise, here for good.

Standard Chartered PLC is listed on the London and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges.

For more stories and expert opinions please visit Insights at sc.com. Follow Standard Chartered on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

ISO 20022 and trade finance: how standardised approach will reshape the industry

What is the ISO 20022 Standards?

ISO 20022 is a standard for all stakeholders in the financial services industry, which significantly reduces the complexity of sending and deciphering information in a structure data format. This methodology can be used to develop structured financial messages and API resources to help reduce the data misinterpretation and ultimately unify existing messaging standards.

The use of ISO 20022 brings enormous benefits to the financial services industry, as it improves end-to-end processing across domains and geographies that currently uses vastly different standards and information formats.

 

How does the ISO 20022 create interoperability?

While MT103 and Fedwire each uses a different standard and syntax, both provide the same information as ISO 20022. An example of how ISO 20022 create interoperability across standards is, while the MT103 Single Customer Credit Transfer 2u ISO 2u st 20 the 52a “Ordering” “DebtorAgent” element being structured differently, it is still essentially describing the same business concept, which is the financial institution that services the account of the ordering customer (or debtor). As such, both concepts can be understood and mapped to the same ISO 20022 business components when processing the data.

 

How is ISO 20022 going to re-shape Trade and Supply Chain Finance?

Today, each bank has an online application where in a corporate will upload the bespoke files containing invoices for discounting (custom format). Such files formats are not standardized and imposes heavy transformation costs, consuming both time, money and resources to translate and decipher prior to book the trade and then process the payment via the MT or MX format message.

In the trade services area, a suite of ISO 20022 messages has been developed to cover e-invoice, invoice financing, demand guarantees and standby letters of credit, as well as factoring services.

 

What is the current stage of adoption?

While there will be a co-existence period from 2022 till 2025 for handling both the MT and MX for CBPR payments, some countries are more aggressive for local RTGS to completely shift to ISO 20022. The adoption of ISO 20022 throughout the correspondent is banking do Targeted to be complete by the end of 2025, ultimately seen as the de facto standard for global cross-border payments.

This sets a strong foundation for upcoming innovations in both the payments and trade space as technology players can leverage on these standards to look at who clients transact with, when are they transacting, and how are they transacting to provide deeper insights on client behavior which helps banks make better credit decisions.

Source: ISO 2022, SWIFT 6th Limited Edition 

TASConnect is selected as the Top 20 Hottest Startups of 2023

TASConnect has been selected as one of the top 20 hottest startups of 2023 by Singapore Business Review.


Kingshuk Ghoshal and Sujay S K

 

Co-founders: Kingshuk Ghoshal, Sujay S K
Total funding: US$6M
Founding year: 2022

The bank-agnostic trade and supply chain finance platform was incubated through SC Ventures, Standard Chartered Bank’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm. It began commercial operations in the second quarter of 2022. TASConnect offers enterprises and financial institutions with scalable, customisable, and multi-funder solutions for Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable by enabling the availability of working capital to last-mile suppliers and buyers in efficient and cost-effective ways. In 2022, the platform achieved revenue-generating status, recording a gross transaction value of more than US$10b by handling over 225,000 invoices. Amongst the platform’s pioneer clients is Lenovo.

 

SEE FULL LIST: 20 Hottest Startups of 2023

 

 

About Singapore Business Review

Singapore Business Review (SBR) is the definitive magazine for Singapore’s business elite. Founded in 2001, SBR is the only local business magazine in Singapore guaranteed to reach senior decision makers in the top 1,700 companies with combined sales of S$692 billion and 94% of listed companies.

Its print platform is published quarterly with circulation of 25,000 copies, while its online arm sbr.com.sg offers daily fresh and unique content with over 170,000 unique active users every month.

Singapore Business Review is part of the media company, “Charlton Media Group”, a leading B2B publication and events company in Asia with titles such as Hong Kong Business, Asian Banking & Finance, Insurance Asia, Asian Power, and Healthcare Asia.