Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank Partners with Publicis Sapient and Microsoft

Publicis Sapient, the digital business transformation hub of Publicis Groupe, and Microsoft, have today announced their partnership supporting the launch of the world’s first end to end digital trade bank, Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank. The two businesses aided in the creation of the entirely new bank by providing it with implementation strategy, technology and client experience from the outset.

Nigel Vaz, Global CEO of Publicis Sapient commented: “Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank understood the opportunity for a bank of the future to innovate its business model in parallel with building a digitally enabled, client-centric enterprise. As a new type of transformation partner, built to help clients become digitally enabled businesses that thrive in the future, Publicis Sapient is proud to work with Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank on its journey to create this new and disruptive model for trade finance banking. Trade finance, unlike consumer banking, has not been reimagined in the context of a digital world. The slow pace of progress has meant that only a small proportion of businesses could access trade finance due to the associated administrative and financial barriers. We sought to address this. What’s more, we’ve proven that it was possible in a matter of months."

Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank (AGTB) will offer a transformational service in the sector by providing a superior client experience and addressing the challenge of creating a revolutionary digital banking solution that helps bridge the trade finance gap. Publicis Sapient will function as a digital partner, utilizing the best of Microsoft’s intelligent Cloud-based security and data solutions, making the entity the very first trade bank that is fully digital from the outset and built on data to provide a single view of the client and all banking operations.

“Unprecedented changes in the financial services industry are mandating the need for transformation. This calls the sector to embrace technologies that combine intelligence and security, while maintaining trust at the centre," said Sayed Hashish, General Manager, Microsoft UAE. “Our commitment to support Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank in this digital journey, is at the core of this effort. Microsoft’s intelligent and trusted cloud is enabling a wave of innovation: this is powered by enterprise-grade reliability, combined with data residency and the broadest compliance. Our Middle East data centres based in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, will speak directly to this, by empowering them to achieve more.”

Trade finance is currently only an option for the few - mostly large multinationals - leaving a trade-financing gap for SMEs who cannot access it, which is estimated at US$1.5 trillion[1] (Asian Development Bank’s 2017 Trade Finance Gaps, Growth, and Jobs Survey). This means a tremendous loss of economic growth potential internationally. By overcoming barriers to conventional trade finance and banking, global GDP could increase by nearly 5% and trade by 15%.

Daniel Gould, Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank, added: “AGTB is rethinking and rebuilding trade finance. Our simplified and data-first approach develops a thriving partner-ecosystem and innovative value propositions.  We set out to build a transformative trade finance bank that provides superior client experience, mitigates risk and delivers an integrated, real time offering to clients. By choosing market-leading partners such as Publicis Sapient and Microsoft, we are able to collaborate and take advantage of their best-in-class capabilities to harness the latest technological advances. In building a fully cloud-based and data-driven enterprise we aim to improve cross-border trade finance and stimulate collaboration within a growing trade ecosystem. Together we are fixing trade finance.”  

Utilising leading-edge technologies, it offers client-centric trade banking services to a broad range of corporate clients to dramatically reduce costs, risks and improve efficiencies in the financing of trade. Headquartered in the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) financial centre, based in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, with additional offices to follow, Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank will facilitate trade between the Middle East, Asia and the UK.

[1] https://www.adb.org/publications/2017-trade-finance-gaps-jobs-survey

Anglo-Gulf Trade Bank was founded as a joint venture between AGTB Holdings Limited and Mubadala Investment Company. It offers the world’s first digital-only trade finance bank to encourage greater trade by companies, particularly in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and Asia. The company uses blockchain technology to offer clients full control over simple, streamlined and highly transparent processes while analyzing data to mitigate risk effectively. Its approach will be to encourage collaboration across the trade ecosystem. For more information, visit www.agtb.com.

Publicis Sapient is a technology company that provides enterprise AI platforms and services. With over 30 years of digital business transformation experience, we enable enterprise clients to transform how they operate and serve their customers, unlocking new value and enabling them to thrive in an AI-driven world. Our platforms Sapient Slingshot, Sapient Bodhi and Sapient Sustain use AI built off this deep enterprise context to help organizations modernize their legacy tech systems, build agentic solutions, and automate their IT operations. The combination of our AI platforms and the expertise of our people enables us to deliver faster and more effective outcomes through solutions that are specific to the unique needs of our clients’ businesses, their industries and their customers. Publicis Sapient is the technology hub of Publicis Groupe, uniting 20,000 people worldwide across 28 countries. For more information, visit publicissapient.com.

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Microsoft opened its Dubai-based headquarters in 1991, which, today, oversees operations across the region.