Commonwealth Trade Bank Overhauls Infrastructure

The U.K.’s Commonwealth Trade Bank is planning to overhaul its trade finance infrastructure and has announced a new partner to support the initiative.

A press release this week said Intellect Design Arena will connect Commonwealth Trade Bank to its Intellect Digital Core Solution, IDC 19.1, which Intellect said would help the financial institution (FI) to promote its digitization efforts.

The core infrastructure technology will be implemented within the bank’s corporate, lending, treasury, retail, domestic, cross-border payments and other operations, according to reports. Commonwealth Trade Bank specializes in trade finance offerings, including letter of credit discounts, receivables finance and document collections.

According to the bank’s CEO Peter Horton, the FI’s endeavor to upgrade its infrastructure “is a big step toward driving our transformation agenda,” and added that Intellect’s offering is “highly flexible and innovative.”

“We are delighted to partner with The Commonwealth Trade Bank on this significant Core banking deal,” said Intellect Design Arena Global Consumer Banking CEO Rajesh Saxena in a statement. “With a strong alignment to the bank’s ambitious growth agenda, we believe our fully integrated IDC 19.1 will support their vision of becoming an innovative and responsive digital bank.

“Intellect Digital Core banking suite is a unique combination of product innovation, technology optimization, operations streamlining, transformational customer experience and lower total cost of ownership for the bank,” Saxena continued.

Banks are increasingly turning to banking-as-a-service and core banking infrastructure providers to upgrade and digitize operations, rather than investing in internal development. But their collaboration with third parties is not always an easy ride. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year noted that many of the largest core service providers, including Fiserv, Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) and Jack Henry & Associates, have caused frustrations with some clients, particularly community banks.

“Smaller lenders and some industry groups say the service providers’ onerous contracts and sometimes mediocre digital offerings have made it harder to keep up with big competitors,” the publication stated at the time.