Read the full case study here.
Sometimes, an industry doesn’t realize how far behind its technology is until a major disruption reveals the lag. For the global shipping and trade industry, the COVID-19 Global Pandemic was this disruption. It revealed a profound technological lag in systems and processes.
Most of the industry still operated using analog systems, such as paper and PDF documentation. Stakeholders such as banks, insurance companies, government entities, and importers and exporters struggled to communicate efficiently, even under normal circumstances.
Fortunately, even before COVID hit, someone was already looking at ways to streamline global trade. Back in 2016, NTT Data, a Japan-based member of Hyperledger Foundation, set out to expand into the trade industry. Previously, NTT Data provided blockchain security to the financial services industry. The organization saw similar challenges between financial services and trade so it approached Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Company with a pilot project - creating digitized insurance documents for trade.
After identifying several more projects for digitization, NTT Data gathered several banks, insurance companies, cargo owners, and trade logistics companies and carriers and created a 13-company trade consortium.
From 2017 to 2019, the trade consortium, which expanded to 18 member companies, identified cross-industry business issues. And it researched potential AI solutions, applications, and relevant legal and compliance issues. The first TradeWaltz test project launched in 2017 with The Networked Trade Platform (NTP) Singapore. Two more proof-of-concept projects rolled out in 2018 in Japan and Thailand.
Encouraged by these early successes, seven companies from the consortium invested in the company and officially launched TradeWaltz, Inc. in 2020, which was just in time for a global pandemic.
Based on its test cases, TradeWaltz created a cross-industry, all-in-one platform for the global trade market. The platform has three layers: a user interface, the application layer, and the blockchain layer. The blockchain layer uses Hyperledger Fabric.
The TradeWaltz platform design creates a trade ecosystem that allows players across the industry to easily exchange information through standard documents in digital form—without risking security breaches or exposure of other data.
Since its initial rollout in 2017, the TradeWaltz platform has produced staggering improvements in efficiency in its pilot projects. Across the pilot projects in 2017 and 2018, the use of the TradeWaltz platform resulted in efficiency improvements between 44% and 60%.
TradeWaltz continues to grow its trade consortium and user base. Currently, there are 200 companies in the trade consortium, and 30 user companies across five Asia-Pacific economies as well as 60 user companies in Japan. By TradeWaltz estimates, the market for digitized data services in global trade could be as high as $825 billion US.
The Hyperledger Foundation team worked with TradeWaltz and NTT Data on a case study covering the planning and rollout for the trade collaboration platform, including details on technology and business decisions, goals and results to date and plans to add new services and markets.
Read the full case study here.
