A recent announcement from a consortium of European banks revealed
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.”