Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- Sberbank summed up the results of work in the direction of trade finance in 2020. The total amount of trade finance and documentary transactions since the beginning of the year amounted to a record US$54.5 billion, while the volume of transactions in domestic trade grew by 70% over the year.

Trade finance products are available in 18 countries of presence of Sberbank Group, a threefold increase in the volume of transactions between members of the Group. International transactions using trade finance instruments have been signed with companies and counterparties from more than 80 countries.

The subsidiary Sberbank (Switzerland) AG is actively developing the Commodity Trade Finance (CTF) direction. The volume of CTF transactions increased by 45% compared to 2019, the supply of more than 20 million tons of goods was financed: grain, oil products, metals and fertilizers. CTF products allow clients to raise financing against the collateral of the exported goods and then repay the loan from the proceeds.

To implement pre-export and investment financing as part of the creation of export-oriented industries, Sberbank submitted applications to the Russian Export Center for concluding agreements on the provision of subsidies for transactions in the amount of 118 billion rubles.

Since the beginning of the year, the bank has opened more than 200,000 escrow accounts, and the balance of funds on them exceeded 630 billion rubles, which is 8 times more than last year. The service for remote opening of letters of credit and escrow accounts, which integrated the bank’s systems with the internal systems of clients using SberAPI, reduced the time for concluding transactions from several days to several seconds. More than 85% of escrow accounts are now opened online.

The number of transactions using letters of credit in small and micro businesses has more than doubled. This was facilitated by the development of simple box-based solutions and the start of a training project on the Business Environment platform.

Individuals can now open letters of credit in the SberBank Online mobile application. The number of such transactions has doubled over the year: letters of credit are used to purchase real estate, shares, stakes in a business, art, payment for services, and so on.

100% of transactions with corporate clients using letters of credit are also carried out electronically in the SberBusiness mobile application. The redesign and automation of the processes made it possible to reduce the period for issuing letters of credit to 10 minutes and to carry out the payment on the same day.

2020 became the year of further progressive development of trade finance and documentary operations in the Sberbank Group. We have increased not only quantitative, but also qualitative indicators of work: we have reduced the speed of providing a number of our services by several times, tens and hundreds of times, expanded the scale of our business and the range of our services, which we, by default, if possible from the point of view of legislation, make them digital and seamless. These achievements were appreciated not only by our clients, but also by industry experts: in 2020 we received the Leaders in Trade award from the leading international specialized publication Global Trade Review in the nomination “Best Bank for Trade Finance in Eastern Europe”. This award is given to financial institutions that lead in business performance and apply innovative approaches to transactions and products - says Evgeny Kravchenko, Director of Trade Finance Department of Sberbank.

AI transformation has opened up opportunities for using the bank’s big data to identify new niches in trade finance development. Machine learning methods are applied on a unique for the country volume of data on domestic and international transactions of customers, including information on trillions of payments for tens of billions of commercial business connections. Recommender systems based on this data allow better identification of clients’ needs in ensuring secure settlements with Russian and international letters of credit and financing of trade transactions.