I'm Meral Şengöz.
Drawing on my experience in banking, trade finance, and regulation, I provide strategic advisory in trade digitalization.
My purpose is to help companies, financial institutions, fintechs, public authorities, and policymakers design and implement their digitalization journey in international trade — in ways that are practical, measurable, and sustainable.
My experience areas are:
- Trade & Supply Chain Finance
- MLETR & electronic trade documents
- Digital transformation & trust layer design
- Regulation–technology integration
My goal is not simply to digitalize — but to build systems that are sustainable and genuinely functional.
Background
Throughout my banking career, I witnessed firsthand how deeply trade and finance depend on paper documentation — and how valuable data gets trapped in silos, copied across documents, never truly connected.
I spent over two decades trying to solve that problem from different positions: corporate credit, commercial product management, trade finance operations, and large-scale transformation projects. I’ve worked in both the private sector and at the Ministry of Trade. That dual perspective has since grown richer through my advisory experience.
In my final years at İşbank, as head of trade finance products, I had the opportunity to lead some of the field’s early milestones in Turkey:
2014 — First in Europe & Turkey
Bank Payment Obligation via SWIFT infrastructure
2020 — First in Turkey
Blockchain-based trade finance transaction
2024
EBRD-backed MLETR projects; T3i Partner Network
Since 2021, I’ve been working as an independent advisor — with public institutions, trading companies, financial organizations, and fintechs. In every digitalization project, I come back to the same three questions: Will this actually work in the field? Is the legal foundation and architecture sound? Can it scale?
I’ve seen how platforms like Marco Polo and Contour operate in practice — where they gained traction and where they stalled. Some projects succeeded; others couldn’t scale. Technology selection is almost always the last step. What matters first is getting the trust architecture, the process flow, and the legal framework right while solving the pain point.
My focus is building the bridge from traditional trade to the digital trade infrastructure of the future — across electronic trade documents, MLETR compliance, structured data standards, trust layers (digital identity, e-signatures), and change management. These aren’t separate workstreams. They only hold when designed together.