Condition-Verified Trade Finance

Replace error-prone paper documents with immutable digital records on a shared ledger. Every bill of lading, letter of credit, and certificate of origin is cryptographically sealed and version-controlled.

• Real Example: Maersk and IBM's TradeLens reduced document processing time by 40% by eliminating fraudulent paperwork.
• Business Impact: Near-zero reconciliation disputes, protecting against losses from counterfeit goods or duplicate financing.

Convert contractual terms into self-executing code. Funds are released automatically upon verified fulfillment of conditions (e.g., GPS-confirmed port arrival, IoT sensor data).

• Key Benefit: Drastically reduces working capital cycles by accelerating payment from weeks to hours.
• ROI Driver: A major European bank automated agricultural trade, cutting settlement time from 10 days to 4 hours, freeing up millions in trapped capital.

Provide regulators with a permissioned, real-time view of transactions. Every step—from origin to final payment—creates an indelible, timestamped audit trail.

• Compliance Win: Simplifies adherence to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations.
• Cost Savings: Slashes the manual labor and cost associated with compliance reporting and external audits by providing a single source of truth.

All parties—buyer, seller, shipper, insurer, bank—access the same verified data in near real-time. This shared visibility reduces uncertainty and builds trust.

• Operational Benefit: Enables dynamic inventory financing and just-in-time logistics based on verifiable shipment status.
• Strategic Value: Transforms the supply chain from a cost center into a competitive differentiator based on transparency and reliability.

Smart contracts enable atomic settlements, where payment and asset transfer occur simultaneously. This eliminates principal risk where one party fulfills their obligation but the other defaults.

• Risk Reduction: Particularly powerful in cross-border trades with unfamiliar partners, acting as a neutral, automated escrow.
• Financial Impact: Reduces capital reserves required to cover potential defaults, improving the balance sheet and enabling more transactions.

Eliminates double-financing fraud and document forgery by creating an immutable, shared ledger for all trade events. All parties see the same, tamper-proof data.

• The Pain Point: Traders historically used the same invoice to secure loans from multiple banks.
• The Blockchain Fix: A tokenized asset (e.g., a warehouse receipt) can only be financed once. We.trade and Contour have built consortia where banks share this risk data.
• ROI Driver: Near-zero fraud losses and a 90% reduction in audit and reconciliation costs.

Democratizes trade finance by allowing smaller suppliers to prove their creditworthiness via on-chain transaction history, not just balance sheets.

• How it works: A history of fulfilled, verifiable orders on a platform like TradeFinex becomes collateral for financing.
• ROI Driver: Banks can safely expand their SME loan books, reducing default risk by 40%. SMEs gain access to capital previously reserved for large corporates, fueling growth.

Success requires navigating legal recognition of digital assets, oracle reliability for real-world data, and consortium governance. The ROI is not in the technology alone, but in the redesigned business process.

• Key Insight: Start with a closed-loop network of trusted partners (e.g., one buyer, five key suppliers) to prove value before scaling.
• Bottom Line: The business case is clear: reduce cost, risk, and time. The challenge is organizational, not technological.