Project Description
Afreximbank (African Export Import Bank) headquartered in Cairo, was established in 1993 by African Governments, both African and Non-African private and institutional investors/financial institutions, with the purpose to finance, promote and expand intra- and extra-African trade. Afreximbank is a leading member of FCI and together they introduce a model factoring law for Africa to enable SCF offerings.
The African Continent is known of its major trade finance gap for SMEs. One of the bank’s strategic goals is to expand its trade finance offerings through SCF to close this finance gap, corresponding with the bank’s mandate to enable trade finance on the African continent.
Capital Chains supported Afreximbank with a comprehensive SCF Readiness Quick Scan report based on internal cross-functional interviews, providing hand-on insights on the bank’s next moves for SCF accompanied with a high-level business case for the introduction of SCF on the African continent.
After the Bank’s approval, the SCF Program Design phase started. The design phase elaborated on extensive market research from the Quick Scan report, giving strategic directions for conducting the market sounding àresulting in an in-depth exploration of the uncharted African continent in SCF terms. Together with Afreximbank, Capital Chains interviewed both financial institutions, FinTechs and corporates in amongst other Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, South Africa and Egypt through face-to-face meetings. The collected information was processed into a clear value proposition, an executable delivery model with a well grounded business case.
The SCF Provider Selection phase is all about finding the right technology and bank partners for Afreximbank to turn this business case into reality. To be able to make an informed decision, a structured comparison of the available technology providers was needed. Capital Chains created an RFP document, a categorized questionnaire covering the Bank’s demands, which was send out to multiple globally established solution providers. The responses were processed in a scoring model, using weighted parameters indicating the Bank’s demands. The RFP process resulted in a top-3 shortlist of solutions providers which were invited for the in-depth demo sessions. Capital Chains successfully supported Afreximbank in choosing their SCF partner going forward.
Next step: the SCF Roll-out and Business Implementation
