Banking Solutions. Documentary Credit File Management

In purchases made outside of Spanish frontiers which require a special guarantee represented by the documentary credit, strict document control is necessary. To respond to this need, SGAIM provides banks with the Documentary Credit File Management solution.

SGAIM offers its Documentary Credit File Management service to speed up the process to grant this type of loans.

Documentary credit is the method of payment that offers the highest level of security in international sales, guaranteeing that the exporter receives payment for their operation.

The documentation involved in this process comes from different sources, on the one hand, the importer provides certain information at their bank and at the same time the bank receives documentation to accredit that the good will be sent in the way agreed at the exporter’s bank.

The documentation must be very precise and include all the documents which have been specified in the documentary credit. There is no room for error, neither in form nor content. Any error in this sense could lead the issuing bank to not proceed with payment, until the errors are resolved.

The procedure starts when the importer requests at their bank the opening of documentary credit and they inform the exporter, indicating the documentation that they must send. Once the documentary credit has been granted, the exporter proceeds to send the goods and, simultaneously, via their bank, they send to the importer’s bank the accrediting documentation that the goods have been sent in the agreed conditions. The importer’s bank receives these documents, checks that everything is correct and proceeds with payment.

The exchange of documents between the applicant for documentary credit and their bank and the importer’s and the exporter’s banks represents a significant workload for the banking sector.

The solution offered by SGAIM allows the scanning of all documents presented by the applicant for credit, the capture of relevant fields and their categorisation by documentary types. Once these steps have been carried out, the documents presented (signed commercial invoice, certificate of origin of the goods, list of contents and weights, insurance policy or certificate, etc.) are then tallied with the form completed by the applicant for credit. The system issues the automatic alarms which notify the bank about which documents must be presented but which are not included in each customer’s file.

Benefits of the Documentary Credit Management solution

• Speed in classifying the different elements that make up the file by types of document.
• Immediate access to all the classified information of the documentary credit files.
• Validations of the documentation presented with the information that appears on the form completed by the applicant for credit.