Four leading financial institutions have joined the initiative launched by UBS and IBM to build a blockchain-based global trade platform.

Dubbed “Batavia,” the new platform advances the work initiated by UBS and IBM last year to develop a trade finance platform built on the IBM Blockchain Platform powered by the Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain framework. The platform is designed to be openly accessed by all organisations and can support trade finance for transactions across all modes of trade.

Bank of Montreal (BMO), CaixaBank, Commerzbank and Erste Group are the latest banks to join the initiative.

“In working with hundreds of clients to implement blockchain solutions, financing global trade has emerged as one of the use cases most in need of innovating,” said Fabio Keller, IBM project lead. “Targeting the creation of large, global, multi-modal networks that bring transparency and trust to each step of the trade process is what makes Batavia a platform with so much potential to transform the way companies around the world do business with one another.”

The platform will help organizations more easily build multi-party, cross-border trading networks worldwide. It will allow transacting parties to view each step of the trade process from the shipment from a warehouse to arrival at the receiving port, while automatically releasing payments incrementally along each step of the process.

Existing process, being largely paper-based and repeated manual reprocessing, is prone to delays and errors. The Batavia platform will address these challenges, allowing buyers, sellers, and their banks to execute transactions with a high degree of efficiency and transparency.

According to the official release, Batavia is targeting pilot transactions with customers on the network in early 2018 to test and refine the platform.

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