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Duplicate trade financing targeted by Duality’s privacy preserving data collaboration platform

By Mark Ford on June 8, 2022

Duality Technologies is focusing on a collaborative trade finance platform on which lenders can check if an invoice has been submitted to, or financed by, another bank while complying with privacy regulations and protecting business secrets.

The Israel-based start-up says its platform enables lenders to work together to fight duplicate trade financing, including duplicate receivables and invoices, without exposing any sensitive information.

The problem

Duality’s efforts in the trade finance space follow the Hin Leong, ZenRock, Agritrade and Hontop Energy trade finance frauds in 2020. In the Hin Leong fraud alone, liabilities to 23 banks and other creditors total around US$3.5 billion.

Seemingly legitimate businesses presented the same invoice to multiple lenders, that, unbeknownst to each other, financed the same collateral several times.

Though the lenders performed thorough checks using the data available to them, they did not share transactional data with one another due to privacy, regulatory, and competitive concerns, and therefore had no way of knowing that an invoice was already financed by others.

Duality solution

The Duality platform enables lenders to search for duplicate trade financing before approving a trade financing request.

A lender inputs relevant details into the platform, such as a company name or invoice number, and is able to automatically check with other lenders as to whether they have already financed the invoice.

Duality says they are able to do this without exposing the transactional information or the identity of the lenders themselves. If the same invoice has already been financed elsewhere, relevant lenders would be alerted without exposing which banks financed or inquired about the invoice.

A full presentation of Duality’s privacy preserving data collaboration platform can be found here.

A blog by Marcella Arthur, Duality’s vice president, global marketing entitled Can Standardization Help Tackle Trade Finance Fraud? discusses duplicate trade financing and privacy in trade financing. It can be found here.