Singapore Registry Aims to Thwart Trade Finance Fraud

In a move designed to counteract the risk of duplicate financing and elevate confidence in trade financing dealings among banks and corporates, the Association of Banks in Singapore (ABS) announced on 23 June launch a Trade Finance Registry (TFR) that will secure and maintain a centralised record of trade finance transactions in Singapore.

Participating banks will register new trade financing transactions in the TFR and if any of the added transactions are deemed to be duplicated, this will trigger prompt notification that further attention is needed. As explained in an ABS media release: “Only information on corporate customers will be provided to the TFR. In addition, data on the TFR is hashed into an encrypted format. As such, matching of duplicate trades can be done without exposing the banks’ underlying data fields to other participating banks.”

The TFR is also expected to improve the transparency of trade financing transactions by enhancing banks’ ability to validate the authenticity of trade through API connections to the Singapore Trade Data Exchange, a public digital platform that supports trusted and secure data sharing between supply chain ecosystem partners.