Credit Suisse, ING Wholesale Banking, Dresdner Bank, Zurcher Kantonalbank, HypoVereinsbank, Fortis Bank and HSH Nordbank are all now live initially to support Glencore, the large Swiss-based physical commodities marketing company.
In addition, other banks including ABN Amro and most recently KBC have signed up for this programme and are in implementation with one of a number of key corporate clients.
The uptake of the Bolero platform by some of the world’s biggest banks demonstrates increasing demand for the technology, which has helped Bolero secure a significant cash injection under its latest round of funding.
“While corporate treasurers and CFOs are increasingly driving for bank neutral automation across a range of bank trade services, until recently it has been difficult for a bank to accommodate this need without shifting the burden to the bank to support multiple proprietary solutions,” says Herwig Huysmans, general manager, trade, at KBC. “At the same time every bank is keen to protect investments in back office technology and e-banking services. From a corporate perspective it is clearly an issue to be forced to utilise the proprietary platform of each of the banks it deals with. The continued emergence of Bolero as a neutral, yet secure, multi-bank platform allows both banks and corporates to interoperate whilst avoiding these issues.”
Bolero has also announced successful completion of an internal funding round. This latest round, led by Apax Partners and Baring Private Equity Asia, will allow the company to further drive forward its successful multi-bank programme and expand its technology development facilities. This funding round is underpinned by the company’s success in the deployment of its multi-bank platform as well as by a number of significant strategic agreements by key clients, claims Bolero.
“As a founding shareholder of Bolero, we are very supportive of its adaptation to market realities,” says Leonard Schrank, CEO of Swift. “We are both the operator of Bolero’s services and now use Bolero as the technology developer for our new SwiftNet Trade Services Utility (TSU).”
