.jpg)
ANZ has taken another dive into the world of blockchain, and has announced the production of a trade finance platform being developed in partnership with a number of Asian banks. According to ANZ, the platform is “not a technological experiment like many other proof-of-concepts (POC),” and is looking to utilise blockchain technology to support the labour-intensive trade finance process.
Speaking to Insurance Business, ANZ head of trade and supply chain, Greater China and North Asia, Vivek Gupta said the trade finance platform exceeds the scale of anything similar implemented before.
“The platform will facilitate domestic and cross-border trade out of Hong Kong, and what makes this project different is that it is no longer a proof-of-concept – it is fully realised and going into production,” says Gupta. “We are also engaging very well with the regulator, which puts us in a really strong position if and when we want to scale up.”
“We will be undertaking live testing transactions fairly soon,” he continued. “ANZ is the only Australian Bank as a founding member of the platform and we are in active discussions with our clients with trade flows between our home markets of Australia and New Zealand and Hong Kong/Greater China to bring them on the platform.”
The bank has identified its reliance on manual processes as an area that lacks efficiency, and a concentrated effort is being made to utilise blockchain technology to make its operations simpler, more efficient and more cost-effective. ANZ New Zealand is also continuing to work on its blockchain solution for the insurance industry, which is designed to remove the massive amounts of manual data handling in the broker-insurer payment reconciliation process. According to the bank, blockchain technology could go a long way in streamlining the way data is handled across the board and has many advantages that current platforms lack.
“Cost is a very obvious advantage,” Gupta explained. “A lot of these processes are currently manual and data-driven, and a distributed ledger blockchain platform puts all the data into one place, so the cost reduction is immense.
“Speed is also an important factor, and this is primarily important from a customer point of view. The technology is completely secure, and there is an end-to-end record of each transaction which is extremely useful. Anyone from a bank, to a law enforcement agency, to a regulator will be able to access that record, so the possibilities are really endless.”
The platform is currently undergoing user acceptance tests, and is planning to launch in September this year.
