India’s overall exports – which grew by 36% to $670 billion in FY22 compared to the previous year, is expected to scale up to $2-trillion by 2030. “This growth can be accomplished by developing the manufacturing ecosystem and hubs, investment in efficient logistics and transportation, availability of finance, and rollout of digital solutions for exporters”, said Sumit Sanghai, Head of Large Clients Group, ICICI Bank in an interaction with The Economic Times.
It is an industry-first initiative, offering a suite of solutions on a single platform with a vision to digitise the entire export life-cycle from discovery of export markets, export finance, foreign exchange services to receipt of export incentives. It also offers unique facilities such as instant disbursal of Export Packing Credit (Insta EPC) and Trade APIs. Insta EPC provides export finance instantly, while Trade APIs enable smooth handling of export transactions directly from exporters’ ERP systems, thereby providing a seamless journey. The Trade API solution provides the exporters with a simplified ‘Do-It-Yourself (DIY)’ experience anytime and anywhere.
‘ICICI STACK for exporters’ is broken down into five layers—accounts, transaction, credit, care and growth. The fundamental concept behind this is to identify the pain points for the customer and then solve those pain points. Sanghai said, “The idea is to nurture relationships with our clients by ensuring that the entire bank is taken to the customer.”
“The set of solutions enables large, medium and emerging companies to undertake their export transactions online, anywhere and anytime. We believe that this initiative will bring in unmatched efficiency in the entire export lifecycle across industries and act as catalyst in their business growth.” said Sanghai.
Exporters can also avail value-added services from Trade Emerge platform, through which the bank facilitates end-to-end journey of businesses’, right from the incorporation stage by enabling regulatory guidelines, partner discovery, logistics and cargo tracking through a blend of services provided by trusted alliance partners.
‘ICICI STACK for exporters’ will further help exporters to avail improved customer service from banks, enabling them to focus more on manufacturing and exporting rather than traditional banking and paperwork. “Since exporters typically need to deal with a lot of compliance pressure, digitisation would ensure a smoother journey for them,” explained Sanghai.The entire cross border journey for exporters has been quite physical, time consuming with document handling and compliance with various laws and regulations across countries. Shanghai said, “The solutions like ‘ICICI STACK for exporters’ will add value in terms of the various processes – whether it is bill handling, availability of finance, or interaction with their client comes into play.” Digital solutions like e-Softex and e-Docs further simplifies exporters’ journey across various stages by offering digital filing of documents, settlement and reconciliation of export invoices, among others. It offers convenience of reduced turn-around time for the transactions from the existing industry practice of a few days to near real time.
It is very important for banks to capitalise on these digitisation initiatives to transform the traditional paper-intensive processes into fully digital trade journeys, creating a new level of efficiency that will significantly benefit exporters.” Sanghai told The Economic Times.
