Banking Giants Team Up on Blockchain Trade Finance Platform

Deutsche Bank and the World Bank are teaming up to launch a new trade finance platform, aiming to accelerate the digitization of global trade finance. The market for trade finance is valued at over $5 trillion annually, but much of it still relies on physical paperwork and manual document checks.

The partnership builds on previous experiments by Deutsche Bank with distributed ledger technology for supply chain management and letter-of-credit processes. The World Bank has also issued blockchain-based bonds in the past, including the bond-i instrument on Ethereum.

Trade finance involves multiple intermediaries handling paperwork such as letters of credit, bills of lading, and insurance certificates before a shipping container can move. Previous initiatives have shown that using distributed ledger technology can reduce processing times from days to hours.