The Financial Supply Chain refers to the end-to-end trade processes and information that drive a company's cash, accounts, and working capital. From a buyer's perspective, this involves the full procurement-to-payment process. For the seller, it is the order-to-cash cycle.

In both cases, the goal of the Financial Supply Chain is to optimise:

• Accounts payable and receivable
• Cash management
• Working capital
• Transaction costs
• Risk
• Administration

But unlike the Physical Supply Chain, which has seen improvements ranging from containerisation to fulfilment management, there remain significant performance gaps in the Financial Supply Chain which contribute significantly to the trapped value identified above. These gaps are the result of the :

• Time required to create, transfer and process paper documentation
• Cost and errors associated with manual creation and reconciliation of documentation
• Lack of transparency in inventory and cash positions when goods are in the supply chain
• Disputes arising from inaccurate or missing data
• Fragmented point solutions that do not address the complete end-to-end processes of the trade cycle

Enabling the Financial Supply Chain
Financial Supply Chain benefits have proved elusive because of the complexity associated with international trade. T he end-to-end trade cycle involves a number of different types of parties needing to exchange information and a variety of contractual documents in a timely manner. Point solutions have provided limited value with limited ability to scale and broader e-Commerce initiatives have failed to provide the platform to manage the complexity of Global Trade, typically being proprietary by nature and/or simply consolidating data and being unable to replace the full content and legal context of paper documents.

To overcome these barriers, enabling technology must meet critical pre-requisites to be practical, and deliver enduring value to each member of the trading community:

• Progressive acceleration, automation and optimisation of the Financial Supply Chain processes leading to paperless trade
• Scaleable to support all settlement types, all documents, all parties and cross industry applicability
• Interoperability with e-Commerce and Trade Community platforms and applications
• Incremental application components to deliver targeted value, speed of implementation and a direct return on investment
• Trusted Third Party platform with neutrality through governance
• Full coverage of the commercial, logistics, financial and regulatory documents required for international trade
• Legal Infrastructure to ensure progression to completely paperless trade
• A complete business platform incorporating information, document content, document context, legal framework and a robust foundation for the provision of trade finance

Source : www.bolero.net