Barclays completes blockchain trade finance trial

Rage Comment : Traditional trade financing methods have many uncontrollable potential risks. For this reason, ABN AMRO, Standard Chartered Bank, Bank of America, R3CEV Blockchain Alliance, etc. have begun to explore the use of blockchain technology to improve services in this field. Barclays has also announced that its partner has successfully used the platform developed by the bank accelerator project company to conduct trade financing experiments. It is hoped that in the future, it can provide customers with more efficient and low-cost services, and the ultimate goal is to change the global corporate trade financing method.

Translation: Annie_Xu

The trade finance project test of large banks has yielded results.

Barclays announced that Wave, which emerged from its accelerator program, has developed a blockchain platform that Barclays partners Irish dairy group Ornua and food distributor Seychelles Trading Company used to successfully transfer trade documents.

Wave, an Israeli startup that emerged from Barclays’ TechStars FinTech accelerator program last fall, said at the time that it was using custom blockchain-based technology to transfer trade documents.

Baihas Baghdadi

In a statement announcing the successful trial, Baihas Baghdadi, head of trade and liquidity at Barclays, said the project believes that joining multiple parties in a distributed ledger system could solve one of the biggest pain points of global trade - the flow of paper documents to track and verify transactions.

“That’s why we are excited to work with Wave to use blockchain technology to save our clients time and money, and to realize its potential to transform the way global businesses finance trade.”

The announcement comes as a number of major banks are testing blockchain applications across global supply chains.

In August alone, the R3CEV blockchain consortium announced that 15 member institutions had taken part in a trade finance trial, and according to news reports, Bank of America and HSBC both have similar projects.