SCF with Ariba and Marco Polo

The platform is important - it must process thousands of invoices and payments, provide processes for managing clarification cases and audit trails, manage credit notes, and perform many other tasks for all parties involved. Equally important to a successful supply chain finance program, however, is the enterprise information captured. Its source can be traced back to a company's ERP system. In a successful finance program, this ERP data is effectively integrated into a supply chain finance platform.

Today, most platform providers offer manual or fully automated integration. This progress is to be welcomed. But the platforms are often limited in their ability to efficiently handle integration with payments or with other participants in the financing chain, such as banks. ERP integration is not just about uploading and downloading files to and from a financing platform.

It also requires harmonizing existing processes into the ERP with the supply chain finance platform to automate end-to-end data processing. In today's world, this means that each institution must have a customized connection to each of its corporate clients' ERP systems. In recent years, some fintech vendors have started to provide independent multi-finance platforms.

These allow the company to connect with multiple banks. To some extent, this has helped reduce the number of separate integrations required. But it has also raised new questions about data privacy, security, transparency and the origin of the data. This is because these are managed centrally by the external fintech platform.

Using blockchain technology can overcome some of these challenges and take the existing benefits of integration with ERP systems to another level. Blockchain technology includes features that allow data to be retrieved directly from an ERP system without the need for manual steps. For companies, this means that they can continue to use their ERP system as before and do not need an additional customized connection.

The data is not managed on a third-party platform, but within the company's own system landscape. It can be controlled, but at the same time shared with authorized parties such as banks, credit insurers, and technology or logistics providers. In the process, everyone has the same view of the underlying data. This increases efficiency, traceability and transparency at every step of a transaction.

Blockchain technology gives banks more control over internal data operations, thus more security. When using a distributed platform, the transaction system is divided among the different participants. This means that each company manages the platform either in the cloud or on its own hardware. Marco Polo is such a distributed platform. It manages trade and supply chain finance transactions and enables participants to offer and access a full range of trade and sales capital solutions in one place.

It is a network of over 35 financial institutions and their corporate clients, all connected via APIs and Corda blockchain technology. Recently, Marco Polo started working with MSG, one of Germany's major IT consulting and systems integration companies, to develop SAP-integrated solutions and extensions. These enable seamless integration and user experience, as well as real-time data exchange between a company's ERP system and the Marco Polo network.

The partnership opens up interesting opportunities for Marco Polo as well as for MSG's customers and partners, especially in the insurance and financial sectors: In addition to the financial products already available, they can jointly develop and offer innovative insurance offerings - all via a unified portal and joint managed services.

Marco Polo does not compete with SAP Ariba. The integration of the Marco Polo platform into the SAP system enables customers to directly manage trade and supply chain finance transactions within the ERP. This opens up new opportunities for all parties involved, especially the customer, financier, software provider as well as SAP.

"Building bridges between companies and industries is the critical approach to creating digital products and services and new business models. With our partnership, we can help companies with key digital technologies like DLT evolve from monolithic ERP silos to interconnected, digital networks", says Bernhard Lang, member of the board at MSG.

In addition, organizations in the Marco Polo network will be able to manage multiple financing programs across different jurisdictions and parties and update their ERP systems in real time. This will enable them to flexibly manage cash flow and accurately forecast demand.

Financial institutions face increasingly stringent risk management and compliance requirements and are constantly challenged to develop new solutions, while their corporate customers bear the cost of a fragmented market offering in the digital age and are paralyzed by outdated processes.

One solution that can transform finance is blockchain technology. With partners like MSG, the Marco Polo network is playing a big part in the digital transformation of banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions, contributing the missing piece of the puzzle in supply chain finance.