Trade finance: The latest industry to boost DLT adoption amid COVID-19

Emmanuelle Ganne, senior analyst at the World Trade Organization, told Cointelegraph that "The current pandemic, which has a devastating impact on small businesses, is an opportunity to accelerate trade digitalization, to the benefit of SMEs in particular." Ganne added: "DLTs have the potential to remove many of the inefficiencies that hinder international trade and to slash trade costs, which weigh more heavily on small firms, a fortiori in times of crisis."

Deepesh Patel, editorial director at Trade Finance Global - a financial broker - believes that "A fully digitalised global trade ecosystem will be seamless and interconnected and probably open source."

A recent study published by Trade Finance Global and the WTO shows that the pandemic has not only sparked further overall adoption of DLT but also triggered the increased implementation of DLT platforms, especially in the world of trade and finance.

Given the ubiquity of financial institutions embracing DLT for its accounting efficiency, the trade finance industry seems best suited to benefit from it.

Skuchain is the producer of EC3, or Empowered Collaborative Commerce Cloud, which is a blockchain-based platform that offers end-to-end solutions for the trade finance industry.

This Hong Kong-based company is a trade finance consortium with a DLT platform that offers a range of trade finance solutions such as duplicated financing checks, payment status updates, preshipment trade finance and invoice creation, to mention a few.

With plans to release a fully interoperable DLT trade platform, the current eTradeConnect technology is currently available in Australia and China, with participants such as the Bank of East Asia, Hang Seng Bank, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.

Based in India with an aim of achieving a global footprint, India Trade Connect is another DLT-based trade finance initiative that is providing a comprehensive set of end-to-end trade and supply chain business solutions on the blockchain.

Marco Polo Network is a DLT platform built to facilitate working capital finance solutions such as receivables financing and payment commitments for enterprises in trade finance.

With a plan to create a DLT network that offers security to international trade, TradeWaltz's platform features an international trade ecosystem that enables electronic document sharing with guaranteed authenticity of transactions.