Multi-Bank Blockchain Trade Finance Platform set to Launch in Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s national bank will collaborate with 21 other banks to launch its own blockchain trade finance solution in August, Financial Times (FT) revealed Sunday, July 15.

The joint project between the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Chinese organization Ping A Group’s FinTech subsidiary OneConnect plans to generously lessen paperwork, costs as well as security risks for members, FT reports.

A major point of the 21-party plot is to lessen the amount of time and bureaucracy associated with signing up new fledging businesses to banking services by smoothing over transactions.

Utilizing blockchain, “some” transactions will be processed in only a day against up to fourteen days utilizing current strategies, as FT reports.

Initially announced in November 2017, the move signals the first case of a regulator uniting banks to enhance trade finance as Ping A, a deputy chief executive Jessica Tan portrayed it. As Cointelegraph announced in May, a former trade finance deal with HSBC was a smaller scale affair that included just a single bank.

“Instead of individual banks trying to do this you have the regulator trying to bring the banks together,” Tan told FT.

Ping A has effectively created blockchain-powered answers for the Chinese domestic market, and it expects similar solutions will provide answers across the border, as indicated by FT. The company, China’s second-greatest insurer with assets worth 4.7 trillion yuan ($704 bln), joined the distributed ledger technology R3 Consortium in 2016.