Lars Millberg: ‘How I started on The Benche’

Lars Millberg, Global Head of Trade Finance at SEB, says that he had the idea for setting up The Benche, a newly launched neutral web site for trade finance professionals to swap knowledge and ideas, after he first started exploring Web 2.0 web sites.

“I’d bought myself an Apple Mac computer and I realised that I needed some help with it,” says Millberg. “I turned to Apple’s web site and I saw that I needed to pay them something like SEK2,500. So I did some Google searching and found a site, in Swedish, that had information about exactly my problem.”

“Another guy had posted about a similar problem to mine and other people reading had posted their suggestions. At the end of the thread, I realised that even though the other guys don’t know everything, the sum of all the knowledge on the thread contained the answer.”

When Millberg was promoted to head up trade finance at SEB, he quickly realised that there was nothing comparable for trade finance and proposed developing such a site with SEB – partly to provide an interactive resource for the industry, in which people could both read and participate, and partly for the value of the ‘soft’ promotion of the SEB brand in trade finance.

The development of The Benche was financed by SEB and the site will be supported by the bank on a day-to-day basis. Initial development – consultations and background research to work out whether it could take off – started at the beginning of 2008, with a ‘soft launch’ to clients at the beginning of October prior to a global launch in mid-November.

The purpose of the web site is to provide a resource for trade finance professionals that does not exist anywhere else, while also sending the message worldwide that SEB is serious about trade finance. Although it is managing the web site, SEB will take a hands-off approach to content to encourage trade finance professionals everywhere, regardless of who they work for, to contribute and take ‘ownership’.

“People can write whatever they want on The Benche and we can’t do anything about it. Well, we could but that would kill the community,” says Millberg. Instead it has broad rules governing the site’s use. “You can’t be personal, you can’t be racist or abusive in any way, but you can write what you like about us.”

But why The Benche? The name, says Millberg, was derived from the original ‘merchant bankers’ in medieval Italy who would travel from town to town, carrying a bench from which they would trade currency in the market squares – different towns and regions having different different currencies. “Well, originally it was spelt wrongly,” says Millberg, but ‘benche’ with an extra ‘e’ had a quirkiness that appealed, he adds.

The Benche can be found at www.thebenche.com.