Infibeam Avenues recently made headlines when it announced an investment of Rs 250 crore (US$ 36.15 million) to build a backend blockchain enabled fintech platform. Now, Infibeam has partnered with blockchain startup Primechain Technologies for the state of the art blockchain platform, which will cater to the US$ 12 trillion trade finance sector.
International trade has existed for thousands of years and involves the exchange of capital, goods, and services across international borders. International trade represents a significant share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most countries. Trade finance is an umbrella term for all the monetary activities related to commerce and international trade – lending, the issuance of letters of credit, factoring / invoice discounting, export credit and insurance.
Trade financing protects against the unique risks of international trade – currency fluctuations, political instability, and issues of non-payment & creditworthiness. The market for trade finance is estimated to be above US$ 12 trillion annually. (Source: World Trade Organization).
The following are the prime pain points of today’s trade finance process:
- Errors and delays due to manual processes
- Default risks in invoice factoring due to lack of transparency
- Delays and frauds due to manual Anti-Money Laundering (AML) review.
- Delayed payments and fraud risk due to multiple intermediaries and data silos
- Fraud risk due to unverifiable trade documents
- Paper-based documents are costly to store and share and difficult to authenticate.
The Infibeam-Primechain blockchain platform will enable and provide immutable platform for real-time issuing and sharing of trade documents. It will also enable real-time tracking of cargo, and will provide a real-time platform for cross-border and domestic trade payments. This will also help in real-time, transparent auction platform for goods and freight contracts. This will serve as a secure and transparent real-time factoring / invoice discounting platform in addition to being a platform for real-time KYC & Digital Identity verification and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) review.
The blockchain platform will be built upon the Primechain API & technology stack and will predominantly run on IBM’s Linux ONE servers. IBM’s Linux ONE servers were chosen because of their encryption capabilities, speed, and scalability.