December 1, 2025
Marjon Wohlen, Co-Founder of Mitigram, shares her insights about how connected infrastructure is reshaping trade finance across Europe.
In financial services, digitalization often focuses on the shiny and new, whether it’s new rails, platforms or data systems. But real progress doesn’t always mean starting from scratch; it can come from reimagining and unlocking new value in existing tools.
That is exactly the case with EBICS.
For many bankers and treasurers, the Electronic Banking Internet Communication Standard (EBICS) is a familiar protocol. First used in Germany and now supported across other European markets like France, Austria and Switzerland, EBICS has long provided secure, standardized bank-to-corporate connectivity for payments.
What few realize, however, is that EBICS is also a powerful enabler for trade finance.
Trade finance instruments, like guarantees and letters of credit (L/C), have traditionally been managed through papers, PDFs, spreadsheets and manual signatures. However, banks no longer want to process unstructured PDFs or rekey client instructions into their systems. EBICS provides them with a standardized channel that reduces manual work, improves compliance, and accelerates turnaround times.
By applying EBICS to trade finance, Mitigram has reutilized existing technology to streamline communication. For banks that already have an EBICS server, the process to connect is straightforward. Corporates, on the other hand, can access all their bank messages through a single connection using Mitigram’s platform, eliminating the need to manage multiple portals for different banks, or use system-generated PDFs. .
EBICS is not just a technical standard, but a secure protocol that makes it uniquely suited to bridge the long-standing gap between banks and corporates in trade finance.
German banks such as UniCredit and LBBW are among the banks that have adopted EBICS for trade finance, as the protocol is increasingly viewed as a pragmatic alternative to more complex and costly infrastructures.
Together, Mitigram, UniCredit and the Brückner Group developed a scalable framework based on the EBICS standard and integrated it into a multi-bank transaction system – demonstrating how existing infrastructure can enable fully digital end-to-end trade finance.
Previously, Brückner relied on manual, paper-based processes. Even with DocuSign, workflows remained fragmented and tracking communications across banks through outdated spreadsheets and documents was cumbersome. These inefficiencies not only slowed operations but also heightened compliance risks.
Mitigram’s integration of EBICS into trade finance workflows signals the beginning of a broader European trend: using existing, proven infrastructure to achieve digitalization goals in trade.
The results speak volumes: A 70% reduction in the time Brückner spent processing guarantee applications, up to 40% faster bank-side turnaround, elimination of 100+ DocuSign approvals, and 100% of guarantees and L/C communications between Brückner and UniCredit now processed via EBICS.
With EBICS, Mitigram is expanding the potential of a standard many thought was limited to payments. We’re proving that real value can be created for banks and corporates, without the cost and complexity of starting over. In an industry where $18 trillion in annual trade relies on trust and timeliness, EBICS shows us that the path to efficiency, security, and scalability is already here.
Mitigram is the leading digital platform for global trade finance execution. In 2024 alone, the platform facilitated over $41 billion in transactions across 120+ markets – empowering corporations, commodity traders, and financial institutions to transact with confidence. Mitigram supports risk coverage on more than 1,000 issuing banks and has enabled over 10,000 completed trade flows – bringing speed, control, and transparency to an industry long held back by fragmentation and paper.
To learn how these solutions can benefit your organisation, contact the Mitigram team here.
Collaboration to pioneer EBICS-driven trade finance transformation.
