In the industry’s first, Standard Chartered is joining forces with Siemens Financial Services to work on blockchain-based bank guarantees. The report, which appears on IBS Intelligence, details that the partnership will include TadeIX, a blockchain technology company.
The financial giants want to upgrade the traditional “paperful” process to a decentralised digital platform which is “paperless”. Not that the main aim is to do away with papers. The conglomerates want to utilise smart contracts that are more secure, fast and immutable. The announcement comes as the pilot for the project gets in its penultimate stages.
Industry-defining project
TradeIX will provide the tools on which the project will run. The blockchain startup has done a lot of work in the trade finance sector. Incorporated in the UK, TradeIX uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to incorporate its solutions in existing applications.
The trial will run on Corda, a blockchain platform developed by R3 together with many other prominent industry partners. The experiment will be ready for deployment by end of 2018. According to Motasim Iqbal, Head, Transaction Banking UAE, Standard Chartered, the trial is run in the UAE.
Speed and efficiency
Siemens hopes to use the new solution to digitise all guarantees that involve transaction volumes. Specifically, the financial services provider will issue, amend and process claims over the blockchain platform. This way, the company seeks to cut down on total transaction time and increase efficiency. The digitisation is part of Siemens strategic mission.
On its part, TradeIX is happy to see that it is contributing in taking trade to the next level. Rob Barnes, TradeIX’s CEO, believes that the new trade model that will result from the partnership is industry-changing. The startup is in another joint project with Standard Chartered and ING dubbed the Marco Polo trade finance consortium.
Per Samuel Mathew of Standard Chartered, the company is enthusiastic about technology and will take every opportunity to promote it. “…we remain fully committed to delivering the next generation of best-in-class trade products to facilitate trade flows for our clients across Asia, Africa and the Middle East,” he said.
