Mobile Banking for Micro-Trade Financing: Use of Automated Trade Procedures

Abstract

Formal tools and techniques that were originally developed for large-scale international trade can now be usefully adapted for use with micro-level transactions. We propose a concept of electronic trade procedures for use with micro-trading: how they can designed; enabling technologies; and current application areas. We elaborate using the example of documentary credit operations, a method widely used for large scale international trade. We sketch a design for documentary credits for micro-trading, based on mobile banking and mobile technologies.

Keywords: mobile banking, micro-trading, micro-finance, trade facilitation