The Trade Monitoring System (TRMS) is an online digital platform designed by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to access trade forms like NXP, NCX, and form A.
On the TRMS portal, commercial exporters and non-commercial exporters can initiate a form NXP and form NCX respectively (a prerequisite regulatory form for carrying out export in Nigeria) and submit them to their various banks for processing. Corporates seeking to pay for eligible services, individuals who intend to remit funds abroad under the personal home remittance (PHR), students paying for school fees abroad, those seeking medical services overseas as well as others who wish to purchase foreign exchange (US dollar, GBP, and Euro) for personal Travel Allowance (PTA) or Business travel allowance (BTA) can apply with the form A via the platform and submit to their Nigerian banks for processing.
A challenge that this automated process will pose to most Nigerian banks will be the integration of their trade finance and other related back-end applications to the TRMS portal and harnessing the full potential of the trade automation process to their benefit and to those of their customers. This is in addition to existing challenges around automated foreign exchange utilization checks when serving requests for foreign exchange for the purposes mentioned above using the Form A. The TRMS Platform owners have recently shared the new application programming interface (API) with banks in Nigeria with the expectation that banks will maximize this value to provide better services to their customers and improve trade financing processing in Nigeria.
The good news is that Union Systems Limited (USL), a leading financial software company in Nigeria has a readily designed trade finance software solution called Kachasi. This solution has been carefully engineered to take full advantage of the automation drive of all CBN trade forms, putting into consideration all integration points available on TRMS.
Kachasi’s readiness to take advantage of this automation was borne out of our previous experience with the first release of the TRMS portal a few years back. Through collaboration with leading banks in Nigeria, USL actively participated in the validation and integration exercises of the pilot release of the TRMS portal and have used this experience to provide the best use of this platform.
In addition to the straight-through processing (STP) provided at each of the integration points on Kachasi, the bank customers can also enjoy online real-time updates from TRMS as all transaction updates can be viewed on the bank’s customer trade finance portal called Optimus.
This piece is brought to you by Union Systems Limited: Africa’s leading financial software company. For more information or a demo of how the Kachasi Trade Finance Software works, Click here.
