Chinsay | Technology to digitalise trade workflows
Chinsay January Newsletter

As the new year gets underway, all of us at Chinsay would like to wish you and yours a healthy, happy, and successful 2021.  

For so many of us, the last year has been difficult, both personally and in business terms, and I am sure the festive break was a welcome respite. I am pleased that on the business front, at least, Chinsay has been able to step up and help many of our clients, old and new. We have seen the challenges Covid brought, and with it an increase in the adoption of our Intelligent Contract Platform (ICP) as we helped enable the move to remote working.  

I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being our clients and the Chinsay team for the support of our existing and new clients during 2020.

I hope you enjoy reading our newsletter.


2020 trends:

The Rise of Digital Strategies

2020 began with many of our companies clarifying and putting their  digital strategies into action. Within the freight and commodity markets, there is a rapidly expanding and evolving technology landscape. Many of our clients took advantage of the products that are evolving to meet client needs, new vendors bringing innovative solutions or built their own technology to digitalise their businesses.

Chinsay has been actively working with existing and emerging vendors to ensure that, as integrated vendors, we can offer clients operating in freight and commodity markets a broader and deeper value proposition.

Work from home/mobile

2020 brought the Covid-19 crisis and the need for more of us to seamlessly work from home. This has meant that old workflows with lots of manual steps (including couriers) had to be re-thought and re-engineered.

The workflows needed to allow for control of many remote steps of the process and the ability to enforce compliance with internal and external regulations.

We’re happy to report that Chinsay was instrumental in helping our clients achieve their goals while working remotely. Our cloud-based solutions allowed clients to use our platforms wherever they happened to be sheltering, digitally sign documents and approve contracts from mobile devices, all while being assured they had followed a fully-compliant process.

Because of this, even through this challenging year, we have continued to sign new clients to our freight platform, with record volumes of charter parties being concluded on our Recap Manager platform.

It has been a good year for our new Intelligent Contract Platform with the onboarding of Rio Tinto across their product groups. To emphasise ICP’s fit for multiple commodity markets, in 2020 we deployed into freight, aluminium, copper cathode, molybdenum, biomass, manganese, and copper.

To reassure our clients as they are working remotely and enhance our position as an independent custodian of client data, we secured ISO 27001 accreditation . This gives existing and new clients additional reassurance that their data is safe and secure now and in the future.


What we expect in 2021:

Influx of small players with solutions for specific   problems – we expect the trend for new players providing software solutions for specific problems within the freight and commodities workflows to grow. Instead of building one-size-fits-all solutions for the entire workflow, innovation will happen at the individual pain-point level. This means that digital strategies will need to be flexible in order to take advantage of these best-of-breed solutions.

Continued need to work remotely – while it’s obvious that Covid-19 isn’t over yet, the shift away from everyone working in the office full-time is permanent. This means that any digital strategy needs to incorporate software that is flexible and configurable and allows for this new way of working.

Use data in new ways – with the advent of remote working and the increasing digitalisation of trading workflows, there are more and more opportunities to capture data. Companies then need to think of new ways to store and use this data to turn it into actionable insights.

Need to re-think systems to accommodate the above – while these trends aren’t new for 2021, the long-term impact of them will be felt in digital strategies and system rollouts this year. Systems need to be flexible, allow for quick and easy integration, and capture strongly-typed and richly-structured data.


How does Chinsay enable these trends?

This year we’ve been working hard to improve the Chinsay Intelligent Contract Platform for our customers. The features we’ve built will improve your workflow customisations and overall user experience and enable collaboration within and outside  the platform.

Enabling remote work with compliance and controls

To help you further transform your manual processes into digital workflows that better suits the needs of your business, we have made the following possible:

  • You can invite and assign counterparties to work together on your platform; you can set preset groups for those you work with often.
  • To keep your workflow moving when you are away, use our delegation feature.
  • You can CC & BCC using our email feature, keeping more people updated.
  • Non-standard versions of clauses can be added to your workspace and you can easily switch between the versions.
  • Improved clause authoring process means you can now do the following:
  • Import content and some formatting direct from Microsoft Word into ICP.
  • Control use of and access to specific clauses by setting clause access and edit permissions.
  • Determine alternate clauses and clause versioning, clause cross- referencing, and splitting.
  • Sync clause updates to all document templates that use the clause.
  • Create and use your own style libraries using our enhanced text editor.

Integrations that allow clients to take advantage of best of breed providers

Chinsay signed agreements with several vendors, including Voyager , Contour and SEDNA , as well as integrations with Veson , RightShip , SAP , DocuSign , and Adobe Sign .

With these partnerships and integrations, it becomes easier for clients to knit together best-of-breed technologies to meet more of their challenges and develop value, creating digital ecosystems.

For you to seamlessly perform activities on the platform we’ve added/enhanced these features:

  • Integrate market and internal data into your forms, workflows and approval processes, ensuring you have the most up-to-date and accurate data.
  • E-signing capabilities with Docusign and Adobe Sign encourage compliant behaviour and lessen the need to use separate systems.

Create and use your data easily

Chinsay is continuing to add new features to give you better control of your data and allow you to visualise it and make it actionable. Some of the features added this year include:

  • Control what you want to see on the homepage of ICP with the addition of our customisable dashboards.
  • Enhancing our document comparison tool to help you see changes over time, not just from the previous version.
  • Our improved message boards allow you to keep your negotiations transparent and discoverable.

In 2021 we will have an even greater focus on data. The ICP roadmap includes a new data visualisation layer as well as improved search and sorting, more standardised reports and user, team, and company views.


Thank you for reading our year in review; we hope it has been useful. Contact the Chinsay Support team at  support@chinsay.com to find out more about any of our new features.

Jan 14, 2021

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