The bank joined we.trade, a solution for executing and financing transactions. The service is already active and is aimed at business customers in Europe.
It was reported that the Spanish bank CaixaBank has added a Hyperledger Fabric solution for executing and financing international trade transactions to its portfolio of business services. The institution joined the blockchain consortium behind we.trade, a platform created in July 2018 to increase the security and traceability of its customers’ commercial operations.
The bank released a statement indicating that the platform was designed to encourage foreign trade among European small and medium companies, follow up on agreements in real-time and generate smart contracts that link the commercial operation to financing and compliance with the conditions established.
CaixaBank highlighted the fact that this platform has been developed by a consortium of 15 European financial institutions and allows importers and exporters, from a single point of connection and in a collaborative manner, to conduct their commercial operations in a digital format simple and intuitively.
They explained that this is a solution in which only customers previously verified and corroborated by the banks that comprise the consortium can participate, which reduces the risk of non-payment. They also said that the system can generate smart contracts in which the conditions of the operation are established.
For example, two companies want to conduct a transaction for the acquisition of raw materials, but they do not know each other. The seller might prefer to pay immediately, but the buyer would be willing to pay only after the arrival of the raw material. Being verified on the platform, both parties could use this solution to perform the transaction and establish the terms of the exchange.
Once the trade is agreed upon, the seller issues a payment request that is submitted to the buyer, who keeps the funds, which are then automatically released to the seller upon receiving the raw material. Then the information is recorded on the network and the participants can establish new business among them or towards other companies.
Joint Project
The we.trade project is a banking alliance that seeks to establish new commercial networks in Europe, using distributed ledger technology (DLT) or blockchain. The consortium was established in 2018 with the participation of nine European banks: Deutsche Bank (Germany), HSBC (UK), KBC (Belgium), Natixis (France), Société Générale (France), Nordea (Finland), Rabobank (Netherlands), Santander (Spain), and UniCredit (Italy). Currently, there are a total of 15 banks involved in the project.
The website of each bank also informs that the financial institution has a node dedicated to bringing the decentralized database to life. It is also highlighted that only the seller, the buyer, and the latter’s bank have access to the information of the transaction to execute the payment. The seller’s bank does not have access to the information unless a banking service is requested as a payment commitment or invoice discounts.
The platform is based on Hyperledger Fabric, a type of business framework on modular architecture blockchain created by Hyperledger, a Linux Foundation organization that is comprised of Blockchain, ConsenSys, R3, Hitachi, IBM, Intel and banks such as JP Morgan, among other companies.
By Alexander Salazar
