India Trade Connect Highlights
- Seven Banks and Counting
- Celent Model Bank Award 2018
- 75% Improvement in Cycle Time For Letter of Credit
Shed Paper and Processes
India’s trade finance business is seeing steady growth in tandem with the country’s economy. However, trade finance processes are plagued by legacy challenges, including lack of agility and transparency, and susceptibility to fraud. Infosys Finacle, along with a consortium of seven leading Indian banks, saw an opportunity to transform the business by leveraging blockchain technology.
The Infosys Finacle team brought all the stakeholders together, to create an ecosystem of entities involved in the trade finance supply chain, building consensus and collaboration. The team then undertook innovative, agile product delivery to allow the conduct of successful POCs (proof of concept) in a secure cloud hosted common environment. The result was the India Trade Connect network, built on a winning combination of cutting edge technology, willingness to embrace paradigm shifts, and strong collaboration among the participants. Cost reduction, risk mitigation, speed, traceability and security, are among the multiple benefits the participants are seeing from the pilot.
“Blockchain technology offers unprecedented opportunities to transform banking as we know it. Like any innovative technology, the usage of blockchain-based applications will gradually increase from early adopters to others who will join based on proven and tangible benefits. At Infosys Finacle, we are committed to reimagining banking and providing a continuous thrust on collaboration with our clients. In pursuit of this, digitization of trade finance processes using distributed ledger technology offers immense potential to eliminate friction, cut costs and increase revenue through new business products that are now viable using modern technologies. Infosys Finacle is committed to helping our clients realize the path breaking benefits of blockchain technology and we look forward to many more collaborations to strengthen this consortium and to building other networks around the world.”
Sanat Rao
Chief Business Officer
Infosys Finacle
The Future of Trade
India Trade Connect is powered by Finacle Trade Connect, a blockchain-based solution for all banking trade finance requirements that:
- Digitize trade finance business processes, including ownership validation, documents certification and payments fulfillment, on a distributed, trusted network
- Offer wide functionality, including bill collection, letters of credit, open account for trade, C2C/B2C transactions, and purchase order/ invoice financing
- Agnostic to the underlying distributed ledger infrastructure (Hyperledger, Corda, Ethereum, Bitcoin etc.) to avoid technology evolution and obsoletion
Faster, Cheaper, Safer, Smarter
- Agile : Letter of Credit cycle time down to almost a fourth, at 2-3 days
- Cost Effective : No SWIFT costs; lower cost of transporting documents
- Safe and Secure : Invoices and orders uniquely identified and stored to lower the risk of duplicate financing. Real-time dashboards track trade instruments through their life cycle
- Revenue Creating : Supply chain visibility enables banks to offer new business products like purchase order and invoice financing and innovative products like open accounts for trade
The Future Is Intelligent
The India Trade Connect initiative brings a paradigm shift in trade and heralds the arrival of collaborative ecosystems. Buoyed by its initial success, India Trade Connect aims to build a wider trade ecosystem of banks and other participants. The near term goal is to entirely digitize and automate the entire trade finance processes. Next on the agenda is a pilot network for open accounts, and expansion into non-banking areas.
