India’s largest private sector lender, ICICI Bank, has tied up with Dubai’s largest bank, Emirates NBD, to develop a blockchain platform to facilitate international trade finance and remittance. Indian bank ICICI has announced the successful pilot of transactions executed over a blockchain, developed in partnership with Middle Eastern banking giant Emirates NBD. A custom-made blockchain platform was used for the transactions, developed by a subsidiary of Indian technology powerhouse Infosys. The pilot transactions saw an ICICI Bank branch in India’s industrial capital Mumbai, remit funds real-time to an Emirates NBD branch in Dubai. In a statement, the bank noted: ICICI Bank is the first bank in the country and among the first few globally to exchange and authenticate remittance transaction messages as well as original international trade documents related purchase order, invoice, shipping and insurance, among others, electronically, on blockchain in real time. The benefit of efficient, near-instance remittance from blockchain technology is one of the innovation’s most telling features, as evident in the use of bitcoin as a transfer of value. For banks and the global finance, blockchain could very well revolutionize the traditionally paper-intensive, time-consuming trade finance process. An electronic decentralized ledger would enable all participants in an international trade finance transaction – the bank, the importer and exporter to access data in real-time. Documentation and record of authenticable ownership, along with transfer of assets would be streamlined digitally, in real-time, on a tamper-proof ledger. To demonstrate this, the trade finance pilot saw confirmation to import shredded steel melting scrap by a Mumbai-based firm, from a Dubai-based supplier. A number of banks and technology companies around the world have already executed trade finance pilots. Some notable examples include that of 15 R3 member banks working on blockchain prototypes for trade finance. In late 2015, London-based Standard Chartered […]
