Tech giant IBM announced that it has been selected by a consortium of seven major European banks in order to build and create a new trade finance platform based on IBM Blockchain technology.

Powered by Hyperledger Fabric, the blockchain-based trade finance platform will ease and facilitate local as well as international trade for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the European continent. It will also help to increase overall trade transaction transparency.

The selection was a competitive bidding process, made by Digital Trade Chain Consortium that comprise of Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Societe Generale and Unicredit.

“To make the Digital Trade Chain network a reality and enable it to serve potentially thousands of the consortium’s banking clients, we turned to IBM in enterprise blockchain to help us quickly bring this highly scalable system into production,” Rudi Peeters, CIO, KBC on behalf of the Consortium, stated. “Their blockchain and banking industry expertise will help us create a new platform for small and medium businesses in Europe that can enable them for faster, easier and cheaper trade transactions.”

The Digital Trade Chain will connect the participants involved in a trade transaction, online as well as through mobile devices. Running on IBM Cloud, it will ease the trade finance process by solving the challenge of managing, tracking and securing domestic and international trade transactions.

The blockchain network will address the financial gap of SMEs by opening new revenue streams and initiating new trading relationships. The platform is highly scalable and will enable SMEs to access an easy to use platform that provides a consolidated view of trade transactions. Digital Trade Chain solution also optimizes some administrative tasks for SME customers by digitizing complete supply chain process. This will allow trading partners to track and trace transactions as and when they are processed.

“By addressing the SME market, which faces challenges in data sharing and access to capital, the Digital Trade Chain Consortium is pioneering a unique blockchain solution with the potential for widespread impact,” Marie Wieck, general manager, IBM Blockchain, said.

The company stated that Digital Trade Chain is expected to go into production by end of 2017.