IBM has launched a cross-bank initiative to give trade finance deals the Blockchain treatment.
IBM has joined United Bank of Switzerland Group to work on a Blockchain trade platform with major global banks.
The future product, dubbed Batavia, would “help banks and their clients automate the trade finance process, which remains highly manual and paper-based,” Reuters reports Wednesday.
The guiding parties have already involved the likes of Germany’s Commerzbank and Erste Group Bank, as well as Bank of Montreal and CaixaBank.
It is a further Blockchain investment for IBM, which has seen considerable success in the field since it unveiled its IBM Blockchain product earlier this year.
“Trade finance is a perfect use case because there are so many participants in a trade ecosystem especially when you talk of global trade,” Reuters quotes Marie Wieck, a general manager at IBM Blockchain as saying.
“Digitizing and creating a level of trust is a perfect accelerator (for business).”
Batavia’s remit remains fairly vague at this initial stage but should focus on error reduction by giving all trade finance parties an identical self-updating ledger to replace manual in-house record-keeping.
A pilot is expected to take place in the Q1 of 2018.
IBM’s various Blockchain efforts meanwhile have earnt its pole position in a survey this month, which named the corporation as the top enterprise provider after it took 43 percent of the vote.
Microsoft came a distant second, with another 20 percent of respondents favoring its Blockchain solutions.
