IBM joins we.trade’s existing 12 shareholder banks: CaixaBank, Deutsche Bank, Erste Group, HSBC, KBC, Nordea, Rabobank, Santander, Société Générale, UBS, and UniCredit. We.trade is an enterprise blockchain consortium that went live in early 2018. The platform was formed by a group of banks to help European small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) get better access to trade finance. IBM has been the project’s technology partner from inception.
Initially, the plan at we.trade was always to take its technology in-house and rely less on IBM. However, the current announcement raises the question of intellectual property (IP) ownership, something that has caused problems for IBM in the past with blockchain consortia, according to CoinDesk.
Part of we.trade’s success was down to the fact no single entity had more say than another. These lines appear to be blurring now. A concession being promoted by we.trade (and IBM) involves a new multi-cloud approach so customers can use Microsoft Azure or AWS, instead of having to use IBM Cloud.
we.trade plans to interoperate with Hong Kong’s eTradeConnect, a blockchain-based trade finance platform formed by 12 Asian banks. An investment round planned for September 2020 will see the platform onboarding some insurance companies as well as more banks.
Every day we send out a free e-mail with the most important headlines of the last 24 hours.
Subscribe now
We welcome comments that add value to the discussion. We attempt to block comments that use offensive language or appear to be spam, and our editors frequently review the comments to ensure they are appropriate. If you see a comment that you believe is inappropriate to the discussion, you can bring it to our attention by using the report abuse links. As the comments are written and submitted by visitors of the The Paypers website, they in no way represent the opinion of The Paypers.