Founded: 2016

Products: Securitisation as a Service, transaction credit scoring, distribution of trade finance assets

Overview: Founded in London in 2016, Tradeteq is a hub for trade finance distribution. Its goal is to enable banks to reduce friction costs in their interaction with other banks, capital market participants and credit insurers.

By enabling banks to run efficient originate-to-distribute models, Tradeteq aims to increase the overall funding capacity in the market. Furthermore, if banks can provide their corporate clients with increased access to trade finance, they can also potentially boost their net interest income (NII) and improve their return of equity (RoE) ratio.

The Tradeteq solution’s success is based on cost reductions and real-time processing but also on making trade finance accessible to investors that previously had no access to the asset class.

Tradeteq is the technology partner of the International Trade and Forfaiting Association’s (ITFA) Trade Finance Distribution Initiative (TFDI) and participates in the ICC’s Institutional Investors in Trade Finance (IITF) working group.

In July 2022. Tradeteq launched TRADA Tokens, the first-ever fully regulated, trade-finance backed fungible security tokens on the XDC Network. Blockchain-based TRADA Tokens add a new liquidity source to the market, extending access to the trade finance market to both retail and institutional investors.

Clients: Include leading commercial banks, credit insurers and asset managers. For example, Tradeteq facilitates transactions between ING and Federated Hermes, a large American institutional investor

Active region(s): Global client base serviced from offices in London, Singapore and Frankfurt.

Partners: Tradeteq is the technology partner of TFDI, has signed re-seller agreements with Microsoft as well as with “a leading German bank”. It is a member of IBM Q network and works jointly with the Singapore Management University on the development of a credit scoring algorithm deploying the nascent technology of quantum machine learning.

Employees: 38 full-time staff

Funding: In January 2021, Tradeteq raised $9.4m from a consortium of US technology investors as part of a Series A funding. The funds are earmarked for product development and geographical expansion. It brings the total raised since the company launched to more than $16m.

Ownership: Largest shareholders include ADV (sponsored by L&G) and a few other technology investors.

Elevator pitch: “The low-risk profile of trade finance and its ability to provide a tangible return on investment presents a compelling multi-trillion-dollar investment opportunity. Tradeteq is building a one-stop shop for trade finance automation and asset distribution.”

Website: https://www.tradeteq.com/

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 020 3655 7897

TMI view: Trade finance asset distribution has great potential to fill a huge gap at the sharp end. With a solution that partners with the TFDI banking network, Tradeteq is already making good progress in this space. By exploring cutting edge technologies with high-ranking collaborators, it clearly has ambition to take this much further.    

Verdict: Tradeteq has the means and the will to properly disrupt the trade space