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Who Benefits from Bolero?

The latest venture promising 'paperless' international trade may offer more to bankers than shippers

BY DAVID BIEDERMAN

The holy grail of modern logistics managers is the "paperless environment." The latest paladin to join the paperless quest is Bolero Operations Ltd., a joint venture between the Through Transit Club, a London-based transportation company that insures over two-thirds of the world's container fleets, and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, which supplies secure messaging services to over 6,000 financial institutions in over 160 countries.

Together the two firms, with the active participation of multinational banking interests, want to reengineer the way international ocean and air freight transactions are conducted. If all goes as planned, importers, exporters, carriers, shippers, forwarders - all of the parties to international sales transactions - would operate under the same standards for electronic transmission of trade documents and trade-related payments.

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