ICICI Bank onboards over 250 corporates on its blockchain platform

With this, Indian corporates, including ones from the ‘S&P BSE 100 Index’, are now undertaking domestic and international trade finance transactions on the bank’s custom-made blockchain platform.

In August 2016, ICICI Bank became the first bank in the country and among the first few globally to undertake pilot transactions in international trade finance and remittance in partnership with Emirates NBD.

Since then, more than 250 corporates have signed up on the bank’s blockchain application to undertake domestic and international trade transactions.

The blockchain technology usage simplifies the paper-intensive trade finance process by bringing counterparties on the same platform, enabling decision making in almost real time. It brings in the improved convenience of accurate and quick transactions, eliminating the need to wait for courier of paper documents across cities and countries and verification through trade intermediaries. This is in contrast to the current process wherein counterparties await the receipt of lengthy paper trails to initiate domestic and international trade finance transactions.

Indian corporates from ‘S&P BSE 100 Index’ have undertaken trade finance transactions of various types through ICICI Bank’s blockchain platform for trade finance. These include cross-border remittance for salary payment to employees of a group company of an organisation, domestic vendor payments in another city and payments for raw materials to a domestic channel partner among many others.

ICICI Bank created blockchain application digitises the paper-intensive international trade finance process as an electronic, distributed and unalterable ledger, and gives the participating entities including banks the ability to access a single source of information. It enables all the parties- buyers and sellers across domestic & international locations, all branches and locations of bank in the country and overseas, to view the data in real time. It also allows them to track documentation and authenticate ownership of assets digitally and execute a trade finance transaction through a series of encrypted digital contracts. Further, it allows each participant to check online the status of the application and transmission of original trade documents.