Slated to go live in the fourth quarter, the Trade Finance Registry (TFR) will be an interoperable industry utility that bridges information silos between banks to combat duplicate financing fraud.

It will serve as a secure database for records of trade transactions financed across foreign and local banking institutions in Singapore, as well as connect to trusted sources of information for validation checks on trade data.

Singapore's banks hope that the new system will mitigate the risk of duplicate financing by different lenders for the same trade transaction, and the falsification of information supplied by borrowers.

"The effect shall be greater confidence among banks in the integrity of their clients and trade financing transactions," says a statement.

The TFR has been in the works since 2020, when Standard Chartered and DBS, with the support of 12 other banks, kicked off a project that said it would use a blockchain network to register trade finance transactions.

In its winning bid to build the system, MonetaGo partnered with Singaporean financial technology provider GUUD to propose a natively interoperable solution that connects to the global hash registry of its own Secure Financing offering.

Banks will perform queries on the TFR using select document information, which will be cryptographically hashed to create document fingerprints that are then pushed to MonetaGo’s secure, unified data repository to detect matches in near real time. Partial matches that represent suspiciously similar transactions will be analysed by a comparison service to return a risk classification of the transaction.

Earlier this month, MonetaGo said it is ditching blockchain for a shift to the cloud after almost a decade of using distributed ledger technology for its trade finance fraud prevention product.

The company says that scalability, adoption, lack of in-house expertise, varying international regulatory comfort levels, and technological maturity were the primary deciding factors in the company’s switch to a cloud-based model.

"We are pleased to have selected MonetaGo to develop the TFR, taking advantage of their experience in this niche area and the use of their global hash registry to detect fraud across national borders. TFR will be handed over to ABS and its appointed operator after go-live,” says Ong Ai Boon, director, ABS.