India is a home to around 65 Million SMEs, out of which a very small proportion has a global presence and an even smaller proportion actively participates in export/import. This is because they lack the capability and expertise required in the current trade market to trade globally. Finding and qualifying trade counterparts is a big challenge in global trade. Furthermore, the absence of any trade intelligence and detailed trade analytics increases the cost of identifying the target product, country, or trade counterparts.
Even if these SMEs succeed in correctly identifying the products and the trade counterparts, the difficult part of initiating, facilitating, and executing global trade without access to relevant trade resources, information, trade service providers etc. makes it nearly impossible for them to trade globally. In addition, finding the proper knowledge and execution of administrative jargons such as trade contracts, quotations, presentations, and other documentations is a major obstacle for SMEs.
Connect2India is a one-stop global trade platform addressing all the above pain points and enabling and empowering SMEs for end-to-end export/import. From initiating to executing global export/import orders successfully under a single roof, Connect2India offers a technology-driven integrated trade platform with a focus on overall trade execution.
Journey towards Streamlining the Global Trade for SMEs
Connect2India was established with a single goal of serving the unmet needs of SMEs to trade globally. Today, a very small percentage of the Indian SMEs participate in global trade and it is difficult for them to enter international markets because of challenges and complexities associated. Moreover, there is no easy and effective way for overseas SMEs to connect, partner and trade with their Indian counterparts. Although, world’s export by its WTO member countries is USD 25 Trillion in 2017, but only a very small percentage of the global SMEs participate in trade with India today. This clearly indicates a huge market size and opportunities that is completely unaddressed as of now.
This is how Connect2India came into existence to enable seamless global trade for SMEs by making it safe and easy with technology.
The main motive behind this trade platform is to enable these SMEs to trade globally with safety and simplicity without any technological, geographical or language limitations, empowering them with global trade knowledge and helping them with end-to-end export/import. Connect2India aims to become world’s most trusted Global Trade platform initiating, facilitating and executing international trade across the globe.
CEO’s Direction Capabilities Leading Connect2India towards Success
“Simplicity is bedrock of everything that we do here at Connect2India”, says Pawan Gupta, the Founder and CEO of Connect2India, when asked about the major advantage of using Connect2India global trade platform.
The company’s single most important focus since the start has been on providing ‘value’, be it to customers, users, employees or partners; that is what everyone at Connect2India strives towards delivering. Connect2India has a strong business fundamental to provide real tangible ‘value’ to their customers and enable extremely sophisticated trade functionality that is easy to use. Connect2India continues to innovate the platform, making it easier to access and use, while expanding its’ reach globally.
At Connect2India, Pawan provides strategic direction, growth planning, as well as market & industry leadership. He has a successful track record of building business grounds up in diverse sectors like global trade, technology, and e-business. Previously, as a Group CTO for Trilogy / Versata Enterprises Group, Pawan developed global growth strategy and helped the companies to expand their business.
According to Pawan, a great company culture is essential to foster environment for sustainable growth as it shapes everyday experience of each colleague.
Providing End-to-End Integrated Solution for Global Trade
There are firms operating in the global trade domain but none of them satisfies the end-to-end needs of their clients. Connect2India offers complete solution to its clients by providing every single information about export/import and helping them in end-to-end trade from initiation to execution including finding target market, gaining access to verified and trusted business counterparts, arranging orders, providing access to genuine trade service providers to help in facilitating and executing orders.
Think it of as the ‘One Stop Integrated Global Trade Platform to arrange and execute Export / Import Orders’. It provides solutions for each target segment – be it suppliers/exporters, buyers/importers, trade service providers or trade professionals, in the global trade domain.
With 14 Million Google Organic Impressions per month, 2 Million+ Trade Counterparts and 2 Billion+ Global Trade Stats, Connect2India is taking a sustainable and holistic approach of solving the problem to increase global trade from India by enabling, simplifying, and evangelizing the complete global trade ecosystem with a strong value proposition for all key players in the global trade segment.
Technology as the Key Enabler
Technology is at the heart of everything they do at Connect2India. It is enabling end-to-end global trade execution through the platform. From finding best target markets to worldwide demand to export/import duties and trade counterparts, all key steps for export/import could be done using the platform in the self-service mode.
Connect2India is using technology to make global trade safe and easy, offering a complete solution to its clients making use of features like NLP & ML-based reputation & sentiment analysis to compute the reputation of a company, counterpart buying or selling behavior using big data sciences, and application of ML algorithms to derive buyer and seller activity pattern. These technology features help sellers to identify and qualify buyers effectively and vice versa. New features such as AI powered virtual trade assistant enables users to execute trade tasks with just voice instructions.
The company continues to enable and empower Indian SMEs to export/import globally using its’ integrated global trade platform. These SMEs are in various sectors such as Agro commodities, textiles and apparels, handicrafts, rubber and polymers, metal and alloys etc.
Focusing on 100% Customer Success
As a prominent integrated trade platform, Connect2India focuses on clients’ satisfaction with its core principles and ultimate business objectives to make global trade safe, easy, and smart for end-to-end export/import.
The company aims to provide a sustainable competitive advantage to clients’ businesses with access to its smart & integrated global trade platform powered by unique and innovative offerings.Connect2India offers business value realization in the form of tangible business products to satisfy the quality needs of its customers. The India-based company believes in making things simple and assists Indian MSMEs to attain a competitive edge on a global scale with a smart analytics-driven global trade engine.
Leveraging technology in meeting its business objectives, Connect2India global trade platform analyzes and draws inferences from market data to enable clients easily access and approach the global trade information and knowledge pertaining to their products.
Integrating Blockchain for Enhanced User Experience
The product and the technology team of Connect2India are also working together to integrate blockchain to make global trade safe and easy. Following are some of the key strategies of their roadmap to integrate blockchain in the global trade platform of Connect2India:
- Smart contract & identity management through Blockchain for the trade counterparts
- Blockchain adoption to export/import products with transparent immutable view at each step, securing global trade transaction and user privacy
- Blockchain integration to ensure trade finance security, transparent and short-time international payments and post trade settlement.
- Payment & supply chain communications through Blockchain.
The key aspect of Blockchain is immutability which is really important for global trade as it helps mitigate risk at various stages and makes international trade fast and easy. This is because of the number of entities involved in international trade such as buyer, supplier, inspection agency, shipment agency, shipping line, customs, financial institutions, government institutions etc. Further, the amount of paperwork at each stage and issues associated with identifying and qualifying trade counterparts because of geographical boundaries would be mitigated with Blockchain.
Passionate Team of Connect2India Helping it to Expand Worldwide
An organization is actually a collective effort and capacity of its employees and a strong team is the foundation of a powerful organization and without support from employees, a company cannot stand in the growing market. Therefore, the contribution of the employees definitely adds up to the growth of any venture.
The product and tech team of Connect2India continuously works on the platform, improving and innovating to enable global trade without any technological limitations. This platform developed by the dedicated team of Connect2India is integrated with global market data, which allows clients to discover counterparts for their products and connects them with multiple trade providers.
A dedicated global trade control panel for each customer enables a proper management of clients’ actions and trade data. Furthermore, the technology team has developed many global trade tools and utilities such as freight finder, freight tracker, export duty calculator, import duty calculator, HS Code finder etc. that helps in various trading aspects and provides market report by analyzing trade data.
Vibrant India needs a Vibrant SME sector and the passionate team at Connect2India looks forward to contributing to India’s USD 2 Trillion Global Trade target by 2025.
