Infosys Finacle Completes Trade Finance Trial With R3

Infosys subsidiary Infosys Finacle has announced the completion of a five-week trial of its trade finance solution using R3 blockchain technology.

In a press release Monday (Sept. 23), Infosys Finacle said its trial with R3 included involvement from 18 banking groups testing Infosys Finacle’s Finacle Trade Connect solutions. The application operates on R3’s Corda platform and is designed to facilitate trade finance transactions; the trial completed simulations of real-world trade finance transactions, the company noted.

According to Infosys Finacle, both domestic and cross-border trade finance transactions were tested, as were transactions across an array of products including factoring, invoice financing, bank guarantees and letters of credit. In total, more than 400 transactions were completed in the trials.

The company surveyed the participating banks and found that two-thirds believe that a shared distributed ledger can successfully reduce processing time by more than 20 percent (with 11 percent believing it can cut down processing time by more than 50 percent). Two-thirds also agreed that their organizations stand to reduce their trade finance operational costs by at least 20 percent by using blockchain.

Participating banks include Axis Bank, Federal Bank, Fidelity Bank and Gulf International Bank.

“Over the last four years, Finacle has made significant investments in developing blockchain solutions in the areas of remittances, trade finance and identity management,” said Infosys Finacle Chief Business Officer Sanat Rao in a statement. “With Finacle Trade Collect solution, our vision is to help banks dramatically reduce costs and improve customer experience by connecting banks, trade partners and corporates on a unified distributed network.

“The trial results demonstrate the value banks can unlock with our solution,” he continued “With an emerging technology like blockchain, collaboration and co-innovation [are] … key to [achieving] exponential benefits and we are committed to help our clients in their pursuits of transforming trade finance with permissioned ecosystems.”