Marco Polo is comprised of a group of the world’s leading banks, together with trade finance technology specialist TradeIX and enterprise software firm R3, are piloting their trade finance solution leveraging distributed ledger technology following a successful proof-of-concept.
Since launching in September 2017, with BNP, Commerzbank and ING as core banks, the initiative has attracted significant interest from the global banking community, with additional banks including Standard Chartered, DNB, and OP Financial Group joining in recent months.
The Marco Polo initiative has developed a solution for post-shipment trade financing powered by the TiX platform from TradeIX and R3 Corda blockchain technology. It enables end-to-end, real-time, connectivity between trade participants, eliminating the data silos which prevent free flow of information causing inefficiencies and discrepancies.
Initially the solution is focused on three distinct areas of trade finance: risk mitigation by provision of payment commitments based on the matching of trade data, payables finance, and receivables finance. It will be delivered via TradeIX’s TIX Platform, an open platform providing applications, technology tools and core infrastructure for the trade finance ecosystem.
The collective ambition is to expand the initiative in 2018 to include additional banks and third party service providers, such as credit insurers, ERP and logistics providers, leveraging the collaborative nature of the platform to create a fully interoperable open-sourced trade finance network.
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