IBM Blockchain Elaborates on Trade Finance Network We.Trade and Its Real World Applications

Worldwide application for blockchain technology is continuously increasing and even though global adoption might still be a long way off, there is a lot of activity and room for more.

A perfect example of a way blockchain helps to create a conducive virtual business environment is IBM’ we.trade. This is a platform which creates trust among customers and also provides finance.

What is we.trade?

Sometime in October 2017, IBM officially announced a partnership with eight banks (Banco Santander, UniCredit, Natixis, Societe Generale, HSBC, KBC, Rabobank and Deutsche bank), resulting in a project called we.trade.

Initially, referred to as a Digital Trade Chain platform, we.trade is a service built on the IBM Blockchain and offers customers a great platform to access and form new cross-border trading investments and prospects all over the world.

By 2018, we.trade was fully functional and accessible for prospective customers.

Solving the Problem of Trust

According to a new post published on the IBM’s official website, we.trade has facilitated business transactions and opened up new doors for more commerce to take place among clients in different parts of the world, without worry. This is easily done because we.trade offers its customers a high level of trust, thereby allaying any worries they might have about their prospective partners.

According to Magnus Montan who is the Head of Business Banking at Nordea – one of the largest financial groups in Europe and also an early we.trade adopter – a really pressing issue with cross-border trading is trust. This problem has now been solved because

“we.trade’s standardized rules, simplified financing options and more, reduce risk and increase opportunity.”

Knowledge of Blockchain Unrequired

Even though it’s a blockchain platform:

“buyers and sellers can find each other through a matching engine of pre-approved, bank-verified participants. They can then draft trade proposals governed by a standardized set of trading rules” all without any knowledge of blockchain technology.

Flowrox, a Finnish cross-border partner of Nordea that transacts business using we.trade has enjoyed the limited risk that the platform offers. According to Ismo Nironen who is Flowrox’s Head of Financing and Risk Management:

“using we.reade was surprisingly easy. I didn’t need to know anything about blockchain.”

The experience has been so easy that Flowrox has now begun investigations on the possibility of using the we.trade platform with some of its own agents as far away as South America.

we.trade Empowering Commerce

Montan notes that with we.trade, IBM is not only solving finance issues but enabling trade at a very impressive speed by using their wealth of experience to create a conducive environment for firms all over the world to trade very easily.

According to Montan,

“we.trade is not only about providing trade finance. It’s something much bigger than that. It’s actually about enabling trade. IBM has clearly been a really important part of this collaboration bringing the technology and the knowledge that they have when it comes to cross-border trade. As we bring this out to more banks and more partners, we can foresee transportation companies, customs authorities connecting all of these with our customers. We’re creating an ecosystem of trust for global trade.”