Trade Finance

Project Objective:

To develop an online platform that provide the user with transparency of the end to end process for importing products, which will also enable the importer to have one point of contact and provide clearing and forwarding companies with a one stop shop for their clients.

Users must be able to do the following:

- Search for items and suppliers

- Apply for trade finance to be able to pay for goods imported or exported

- Track and trace the goods

- Have insurance for their goods while importing or exporting

- Customs

- Educate users about Incoterms, what they mean and how to use them.

Problem statement:

How might we take complexity out of the importer’s life and enable clearing and forwarding companies to have a one stop shop for their clients

Challenges:

- Getting hold of Clearing & Forwarding users

- No trust between the suppliers and importers in the business of importing and exporting, so we had to build some trust between us and the users we were interviewing

- Lack of knowledge for new users resulting in high cost implications in the process

- Trade finance is a new product in the bank so we couldn’t leverage from any existing products or services currently being used

The approach:

I followed a human-centred design process in this project:

First thing I did was to "Understand",

1.Research:

To conduct research to get a detailed and empathic understanding of our customers and the problem we are trying to solve. What really matters to our customers?