Author: Digital Trade Outlook

Afreximbank and the East African Business Council have signed an Africa Trade Gateway agency agreement to connect East African SMEs and exporters to digital trade across the AfCFTA.

Jordan Ahli Bank appoints Suleiman Abu Khader, former Bank al Etihad Iraq CEO and FAB Jordan chief, as Chief Wholesale Banking Officer.

Gillian Tan takes over policy, payments and financial crime at the Monetary Authority of Singapore from 1 November as Loo Siew Yee moves up.

Surecomp has announced that Körber Technologies GmbH, a leading manufacturer, has successfully gone live with its RIVO platform, automating transaction processing and centralizing visibility across its global trade finance operations.

Visa has unveiled a new approach to onchain credit, aimed at helping stablecoin linked card programs and fintechs access working capital by pairing onchain lending infrastructure with Visa’s own data.

Building on Evrotrust’s footprint across Central and Southeast Europe and Trustfull’s cross border digital intelligence, the partnership should help both companies serve existing customers better while expanding into new European markets.

UniCredit has acquired a minority stake in Frankfurt-based fintech VC Trade, strengthening its digital debt financing capabilities across Europe. The investment will support VC Trade’s international expansion and accelerate the digitisation of syndicated loans, Schuldscheine and other debt transactions.

Razorpay has launched Vulcan, which it calls India’s first transformer based AI foundation model built specifically for payments. The goal is to make every digital payment in the country more reliable, safer and predictable. Built with NVIDIA and AWS, the model combines Razorpay’s payments data with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing and AWS’s cloud infrastructure, groundwork the company says India’s e commerce market will need as it heads toward a projected $350 billion by 2030. An internal Razorpay study across 1.5 million shoppers and more than 51,000 businesses found the same payment friction, failed transactions, drop offs and delays, showing up identically…

DBS and Citi have demonstrated the potential for 24/7 cross-border USD payments by completing a weekend transaction between Singapore and the U.S. using tokenised deposits on the Swift Digital Ledger. Settled within minutes instead of up to two business days, the transaction highlights how tokenised money on established banking infrastructure could improve liquidity management, reduce time-zone and weekend delays, and give corporate treasurers faster access to funds across markets.

India’s TReDS platforms are looking to deepen MSME invoice financing by bringing insurance companies and mutual funds in as secondary investors. RXIL’s proposed model would allow existing financiers to sell part of their exposure, improving liquidity and enabling them to recycle capital into new MSME financing transactions.