Born in the cloud, Trade Ledger is revolutionising the way commercial banks operate.
To fully exploit the commercial opportunities, Trade Ledger switched from its existing hyperscale cloud provider to Microsoft Azure.
Its timely move opened up new, transformative AI possibilities with Azure OpenAI.
Microsoft adds real weight and credibility to our relationships in the commercial finance space, allowing a double-pronged approach to selling, which carries real value.
Alan Walsh, VP of Channels, Trade Ledger
“By far the biggest supply and demand mismatch – one of the things that is holding humanity back – is the way businesses are financed,” states Martin McCann, CEO and Cofounder of Trade Ledger. “Smaller and growth companies find it very difficult to get credit from banks.”
The effect is that the most available credit products for small and growth companies are credit cards and overdrafts, often based on personal guarantees from the business owner. Trade Ledger estimates that 65 million businesses around the world have an unmet financing need.
“This is a problem that needs to be rectified so that businesses can grow faster, hire more people and have more of an impact,” continues Martin McCann.
“Trade Ledger was founded to solve this problem for lenders and businesses. We are innovating in the concept of working capital and growth credit products for businesses. We want to modernise and digitalise working capital.”
Through the use of smart technology and new digital datasets, Trade Ledger has reimagined lending so the world’s leading lenders can give businesses faster access to funds exactly when they need it.
The first global bank to adopt the Trade Ledger platform in 2019 presented many concerns about deploying a true software-as-a-service architecture. Initially, the bank wanted to host the solution in its private cloud. Only by working closely together were the team able to successfully address the bank’s concerns. The ensuing successful deployment of Trade Ledger enabled the bank to reduce approval time for receivables finance customers from 42 days to 48 hours.
The bank’s many objections were indicative of the sector’s traditional, somewhat reluctant approach to driving change and adopting innovation. It led the Trade Ledger team to understand that, for more banks to benefit from the process improvements enabled through its platform, the sector’s reluctance to adopt innovation needed to be addressed.
Commercial banks needed to feel full faith in the Trade Ledger proposition. For this reason, Trade Ledger took the decision to move away from its existing hyperscale cloud provider and switch to Microsoft Azure.
Alan Walsh, VP of Channels at Trade Ledger, explains, “Microsoft adds real weight and credibility to our relationships in the commercial finance space, allowing a double-pronged approach to selling, which carries real value.”
“Being able to work through the Microsoft umbrella has significant benefits for a small, independent software company,” agrees Martin McCann.
“It's difficult for small companies like us to put in place wholesale agreements with banks for critical operational technology. Microsoft provides collaboration and resources to help us to be fully compliant with those technology stacks. It helps us both get through the doors and get through the gates of getting contracts signed by having Microsoft at our side.”
Martin McCann continues, “Microsoft is also much more aligned with creating solution value and talking about solution value the same way we do. We’ve also found Microsoft has a much more mature ecosystem of specialist partners. We’ve been able to lean into that to move quicker and get product to market faster. We have been surprised how easily everyone has worked together and it has made the switch to Azure easier and more seamless.”
The migration also provided Trade Ledger with an opportunity to rethink its solution architecture–an opportunity the team were keen to capitalise on in full.
“When you do a greenfield rebuild of something with more knowledge and more expertise, you can make it better and more usable,” emphasises Martin McCann. “We’ve extended that not just through origination and decision making, but through the entire lifecycle.”
This includes developing the team’s innovation capabilities with intelligent use of Azure DevOps and GitHub Copilot automations. Martin McCann says, “GitHub Copilot has been extremely helpful and we’re finding more and more use cases are possible.”
Trade Ledger has been eager to exploit integration possibilities across the entire Microsoft stack.
“One thing that has really delighted customers has been the way we have been able to integrate with the Microsoft components within their front and middle office. We’ve been able to distribute work in the place where those bankers are already working, which is Microsoft Teams. That’s really helped to make their life easier.”
“We’ve been surprised by just how much customers love the integration with Teams and what a big impact that’s had,” admits Martin McCann.
“Microsoft dominates in the front-office and middle-office – which is where working capital happens. Bankers don’t have to go to a different application because Trade Ledger has that tight integration with Teams. They can use the process workflows, notifications, manage risks and execute tasks for customer onboarding and credit evaluation from Teams while talking to the customer.”
He adds, “We’re fully integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365, so there’s the CRM integration. The datasets are completely integrated, so users can build their full reporting in Power BI with a low-code environment. There’s a huge benefit for the banks in having Trade Ledger as a component within Microsoft’s Future of Work strategy.”
“The other huge benefit is in how our customers manage their technology stack. Trade Ledger is effectively a component on Microsoft Azure, so the banks can manage it as an extension of their existing Microsoft real estate. It all fits within the governance, risk and information security policies of their existing Microsoft enterprise stack.”
Perhaps the most exciting opportunities for Trade Ledger and its customers have been driven by the access to new technologies via the Azure platform.
Martin McCann enthuses, “We’ve seen a lot of technology benefits because we’re now working with the biggest player in the field of Generative AI.”
Although Trade Ledger couldn’t have foreseen at the time it made the switch, its migration to Azure has meant rapid access to a market-leading breadth of innovation in AI and Generative AI.
“It was more fortuitous than planned. We feel like we’re in at the ground floor because we’re working in the Microsoft stack,” admits Martin McCann. “We’ve had access to the technologies, thinking and resources of Microsoft’s Generative AI solutions which really is the missing piece of the puzzle. It means we can leapfrog the missing solution capabilities that are holding back supply and demand flows on working capital and gross innovation capital.”
As technologists, the Trade Ledger team continually scans the market for transformative technology innovations. Its 2016 decision to discount blockchain in FS&I now looks prescient. However, the team clearly sees the revolutionary potential of Generative AI.
“Generative AI is going to change the value proposition of business banking,” says Martin McCann. “We’ve reached a tipping point now where AI is going to reinvent value chains in financial services. With Microsoft to support us on the product and development side, we’ll be launching a number of horizontal-specific Generative AI use cases for commercial banking in 2025.”
Initially, this will be focused on using AI to deliver new fraud detection and fraud prevention capabilities for customers.
Martin McCann explains, “The innovation will just drop into the product as per our roadmap. There’s nothing for customers to do; they simply get new analysis and alerts and risks flagged, based on the data we have in the model. It is useful for identifying known and predicting new patterns of fraud and our tech choices have meant that we’ve got to that quite quickly.”
Faster innovation with Generative AI
The Trade Ledger team is now working closely with Microsoft to prototype a Trade and Working Capital Copilot, based on Microsoft Azure OpenAI and Copilot technologies.
The solution comprises four “virtual bankers”. The first is a customer-facing relationship agent which analyses customer cash flows to identify the right products to aid the customer’s cash flow management. It can automatically start the application and onboarding process. The second is a customer data expert, which can match customer information with the bank’s risk appetite to assess the options the human relationship manager has to process the customer’s request. The third Copilot agent is a credit expert with deep knowledge of the specialist products and codified rules for application creation. The fourth is the operations agent, to support the creation of the documentation once the credit decision has been made.
“We are within months of releasing this disruptive technology,” reports Martin McCann. “We’ve had a slow roll to ensure the platform is stable enough to base a multi-year FSI solution on but we’re there now. By the middle of next year, this will be a scalable production use case.”
The first bank for which this new technology will be accessible is the Bank of Queensland which, as a new customer, will be onboarded directly onto the Trade Ledger solution running on Microsoft Azure.
Having already reduced credit provision from weeks to hours, Trade Ledger expects its new Copilot innovations will enable the business and commercial banks using its solution to reduce the process to minutes.
“It’s going to mean that commercial banks can start to operate more in terms of the financial performance of retail banks,” advances Martin McCann. “Currently, the sector typically delivers five percent lower returns. Our platform will put commercial banking on a par with retail banking for the first time.”
For the Trade Ledger team, the decision to switch to Microsoft Azure has paid incredible dividends. Its customers are also seeing tangible benefits.
“It’s just easier for banks to consume this technology under the Microsoft umbrella,” says Alan Walsh. “Banks can buy our innovation through the MACC transactions in the Microsoft Marketplace and we can be part of that wider ecosystem. The maturity of how Microsoft’s marketplace works, the strength of the overall technology stack and the support for AI innovation helps us to innovate for our customers.”
“We want to work with banks who want to move the needle on innovation,” emphasises Martin McCann. “Trade Ledger is the best option for business and commercial banks to drive change and achieve product innovation and financial performance at levels they didn’t before believe were possible.”
Being able to work through the Microsoft umbrella has significant benefits for a small, independent software company.
Martin McCann, CEO and Cofounder, Trade Ledger
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