Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) in Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and the Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) of Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) have announced the completion of a cross-border digital trade financing pilot.
This pilot is for the transfer of electronic records between the countries which is part of the continued push from the G7 economies to facilitate the exchange of such records as digitalization becomes key going forward and with the world shrinking even further. This kind of exchange is important for transaction processing and also would help each country to keep tabs over international trades and settlements so that it can be used for processing, accounting and monitoring as well. This exchange adopted the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law’s (UNCITRAL) Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) which would set the standards for such records to exchange so that each country involved in the process would be able to develop associated processes based on these records.
“Singapore is keen to accelerate the digitalization of trade finance to promote greater trust, efficiency, and cost savings in the financing of global and regional trade,” said Leong Sing Chiong, deputy managing director of markets and development at MAS. “With this pilot, we hope to see broader adoption of digital trade finance in Singapore and the region.”
Singapore and the UAE have very strong financial services sectors and it would be important that a lot of innovation surrounding the digital world would come from these two regions. It is expected that these 2 regions would lead the rest of Asia as China seems to be going the other way in terms of the shutdown of startups and innovation in the digital and e-commerce world.
“Singapore is keen to accelerate the digitalization of trade finance to promote greater trust, efficiency, and cost savings in the financing of global and regional trade,” said Leong Sing Chiong, deputy managing director of markets and development at MAS, in the joint announcement. “With this pilot, we hope to see broader adoption of digital trade finance in Singapore and the region.”
Digitalization of trade finance would be a significant step towards improving the speed, reliability, and transparency of the systems across countries.
