Standard Chartered completes live transaction on Ant Group’s blockchain platform

By Edil Corneille

Standard Chartered has completed what is said to be the first cross border live transaction on the Trusple platform of AntChain (the blockchain-based technology solution of Ant Group). The newly launched Trusple is a digital international trade and financial service platform.

Standard Chartered is the first international banking partner for the trading platform in the Asia region, as well as the only advising bank to have facilitated a transaction on the platform prior to its launch today. Trusple was launched at the Blockchain Industry Summit of the INCLUSION FinTech Conference, organised by Ant Group and Alipay.

Guofei Jiang, President of Advanced Technology Business Group, Ant Group said, “Even in today’s digital environment, the cooperative links between many businesses still remain broken. As we’ve demonstrated in our first transaction with Standard Chartered, blockchain technology has the potential to rebuild the collaborative trust in the digital economy and enhance operational efficiency across the industry. In the last few years, AntChain has been focusing on establishing industry benchmarks in various business scenarios to accelerate the connection between businesses on the blockchain network…”

Through the integration of its financial services with Trusple, Standard Chartered can offer buyers and sellers, typically small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), improved access to trade finance.

Ben Hung, Regional CEO, Greater China and North Asia, Standard Chartered, said: “With supply chains around the world impacted by COVID-19, now more than ever, it is critical that SMEs get the support they need to recover, grow and reignite economic growth. This partnership with Trusple helps us to further enhance connectivity in the supply chain in Asia and provide financing to SMEs when they need it most.”

The use of blockchain, which will be enabled in due course, also means enhanced transparency and traceability for all transactions across the entire supply chain, which reduces fraud risk and provides greater assurance, resulting in increased trust among all trade participants.

Specific to the sellers, the ability to track and trace every successful transaction creates a ‘chain credit’, from which financial institutions can make use of this data to determine a seller’s creditworthiness when meeting its financing needs. In addition, the automation of all trade processes combined with seamless connectivity to Standard Chartered’s Straight2Bank digital banking platform creates a closed-loop ecosystem, thereby leading to faster turnaround times and greater cost efficiencies for businesses.

Standard Chartered is a founding member of Contour, a blockchain-based open industry platform focusing on digitising trade finance, and has recently completed the first cross-bank Letter of Credit transaction between Vietnam and Thailand over blockchain. In August 2019, it also announced a strategic collaboration with SAP Ariba to make its financial supply chain solutions easily accessible to businesses in the Asia Pacific region through Ariba network, a digital business network connecting over 4.2 million companies in 190 countries.