Blockchain Flourishes Cross-border Financial Trades in Europe

By Sumedha Bose

A recent announcement from a consortium of European banks revealed

that they have managed to use a jointly developed blockchain platform,

we.trade, to successfully complete their first cross-border financial trade

based on the blockchain. As per the announcement, the blockchain based

cross-border real-life trades had been facilitated by four European banks

through assistance extended to ten companies over the last five days.

One of the nine founding institutions of the joint blockchain based

transaction platform is we.trade. HSBC, said that three of its clients completed

open account transactions through we.trade platform last week, within

Europe.

We.trade is a fully automatic digital platform that is available round the

clock, and helps manage, track and protect the trade transactions using

smart contracts and distributed ledger technology. It offers a user-friendly

interface that ensures automatic payments according to the contractual

agreements, making the whole process quicker than the traditional

methods. To be able to use the platform, the companies must be

customers of the nine founding member banks.

We.trade has been built on the blockchain platform by IBM and makes

uses of its Hyperledger fabric technology. The nine founding members of

we.trade are- HSBC, Rabobank, Santander, Deutsche Bank, Nordea,

Natixis, Unicredit, Société Générale and KBC. As per a previous report

published in April, we.trade had planned to start testing of the platform in

May, with an aim to launch the platform commercially in the coming

summer. In the meanwhile, Société Générale had said that they are able to

expedite the development of we.trade as its core focus in on facilitating

the trading of small and medium-sized businesses (SME’s) in Europe.

In relation to the announcement made today, IBM’s blockchain leads in

Europe; Parm Sangha was quoted saying that “As we.trade has moved

from pilot applications to conducting live transactions across borders, it

has demonstrated the power of blockchain technology in an enterprise

setting.”

Adding to the comments made by Parm Sangha, the COO of the platform,

Roberto Mancone said that the next step of the platform is going to be

“getting buy-in from additional banks and their customers in Europe and

further afield.”