Bolero International, an operating agency floated by SWIFT (an association of 6,000 banks) and the TT Club (an association of insurers, shipping lines etc) will start commercial operations in August. Sylvester-Evans is a regular visitor to India, and has been interacting with Indian banks, evangelising e-commerce and introducing the Bolero initiative. Recently in Calcutta, he met Suman Layak of The Financial Express for an interview.

You have been visiting India pretty often. How equipped is India and inparticular the Indian banks to adopt the Bolero concept or use services of Bolero International?

Taking a generalistic view of any e-commerce system that you might adopt - in India you must have in place the technology so that banks are able to talk to each other as well as their customers. I understand such things are slowly falling into place in India. Corporations must get used to talking to their banks, seeking information electronically.

The second step would be to let corporations open a letter of credit with the bank electronically, when it is importing something. The logical next step would be the electronic return of these documents. It is a step by step process. It depends on the parties linked electronically, the exporter the importer, their banks, the authorities, shippers, insurers all agreeing to transact electronically. Initially, there will be ways around the problem where you can transfer impressions of paper documents too.

Where India is today, I believe you have leapfrogged in amajor way as far as telecommunications is concerned, it is as good as many western nations. The e-commerce or EDI systems that you are putting in place today can be very easily bolted on to the Bolero services.

There are other initiative apart from Bolero, the World Trade Organisation is working on a similar service called Tradecard. Is there an effort to integrate these different initiatives in electronic trading?

I believe success will come only when all the individual initiatives can link together and add value. Bolero started off as an open initiative, not trying to control the way trade is conducted. It just provides a delivery channel for electronically transferring documents. The success will depend on building trading chains between partners who want to trade electronically. Bolero will provide the central part of the system the core messaging service and title registry.

There are certain initiatives in the south-east Asian countries, especially Singapore where the banks are alreadytalking to each other. Bolting on such a system on to Bolero would be easy. All you have to do is to agree to a set of standards.

A recent article on the subject mentions that American business is not showing too keen an attitude on Bolero. Your comments.

You see everyone is now waiting for the International Chamber of Commerce to come up with the uniform rules and guidelines. Once they are in place it will assist standardisation of trade. The draft is now with the national committee of ICC. These rules will be for all the players and not just the banks. We are hoping that it will be passed at the November meeting of the ICC.

The importance of the rules is that they are flexible enough to be suitably amended. We are framing rules for something that yet does not exist and these can be amended as and when suitable best practices evolve. We have agreed that the rules will require amendments.

Another reason why some American banks are slow to endorse the Bolero initiative is that they have alreadyinvested in trade processing systems in USA. Now these can be easily connected to the Bolero system, but there will be a cost of integrating it with the back office operations.

So will it also create opportunities for software service companies?

Software service companies will have a major opportunity to assist not just the banks but the corporations to get hooked on to the Bolero. The system would use the Internet protocol. The opportunity with corporations will be greater as banks might already be using sophisticated systems for communicating electronically.

Also there will be a lot of value added services involved with the system and I believe there will be a class of service providers who will provide a complete package solution for electronic trading. The role of the `trusted third party' will be very important. In this case Bolero International, which will operate the service will be an important `trusted third party'.The transition time to Bolero or any other comprehensive system isestimated to be 10 years. How do you view this period?

I believe that the transition will be a slow transition. But 10 years ago all this was a pipe dream and no one believed things would happen so fast. But I feel it will take more than 10 years and there will always be some people who will want to see paper. So there will be a dual system around for some time. When organisations see the benefits the pace of change will escalate. There are hurdles at the country level. The laws have to be amended to accept electronic documents as evidence, but this is not unsurmountable. I heard there is some important legislation pending in India on e-commerce. This shows that there is an underlying desire to relegate paper.

India is well placed to accept these changes as you trade with Europe, USA and the far eastern countries. These are the places where changes are taking place the fastest and where Bolero will be in place soon.

Some of the African countries are not that well prepared. But the way the Internethas penetrated in India indicates the degree of growth that might take place in the e-commerce too. I have looked at Indian websites and I find that they are pretty good.