Blockchain-Driven Digital Trade Chain
Key Points
- Keith Bear, IBM’s VP for financial markets, outlines how collaborative networks—leveraging digital trade chain, cloud, and blockchain—are reshaping financial services.
- By creating a shared blockchain environment, banks can provide greater credit to SMEs, whose access to formal financing is currently limited to about 50%.
- The solution uses a four‑tier architecture: Hyperledger Fabric on IBM Cloud, a peer node for each participating bank, API Connect (and optionally IBM MQ) for integration, and a user‑friendly presentation layer for SME clients.
- SMEs place orders through their bank’s interface, the transaction flows across the blockchain network to the counterpart’s bank, delivering end‑to‑end trust and transparency for cross‑border trade.
- As more banks, SMEs, and regions join, the digital trade chain’s market value and impact are expected to grow significantly.
Full Transcript
# Blockchain-Driven Digital Trade Chain **Source:** [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGOrDYZ0quU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGOrDYZ0quU) **Duration:** 00:02:48 ## Summary - Keith Bear, IBM’s VP for financial markets, outlines how collaborative networks—leveraging digital trade chain, cloud, and blockchain—are reshaping financial services. - By creating a shared blockchain environment, banks can provide greater credit to SMEs, whose access to formal financing is currently limited to about 50%. - The solution uses a four‑tier architecture: Hyperledger Fabric on IBM Cloud, a peer node for each participating bank, API Connect (and optionally IBM MQ) for integration, and a user‑friendly presentation layer for SME clients. - SMEs place orders through their bank’s interface, the transaction flows across the blockchain network to the counterpart’s bank, delivering end‑to‑end trust and transparency for cross‑border trade. - As more banks, SMEs, and regions join, the digital trade chain’s market value and impact are expected to grow significantly. ## Sections - [00:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGOrDYZ0quU&t=0s) **Blockchain Network Boosts SME Credit** - Keith Bear explains how IBM and a consortium of banks are using a shared blockchain platform to create trust and transparency, enabling greater credit access for small‑and‑medium enterprises in cross‑border trade. ## Full Transcript
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hello my name is Keith bear I'm vice
president for financial markets for IBM
we are here to talk about the growth of
collaborative networks that focused on
improving efficiencies in creating new
business propositions for financial
services the example I'd like to talk
about is the digital trade chain digital
technology cloud blockchain these are
all technologies which are driving
significant transformation in financial
services set of banks are come together
to solve one of the challenges within
financial services which is the small
and medium enterprise part of
transaction banking only half of whom
have access to any formal credit from
their banks we are building a blockchain
environment that will exist between
banks it will create trust and
transparency between the small medium
enterprises that are served by each
individual bank therefore therefore the
banks to offer more credit facilities
than they might otherwise do so so this
is what the digital trade train solution
looks like in practice we have a
blockchain environment network in the
middle which all banks are connected to
and the banks in turn are connected to
the SMEs who they have a banking
relationship with therefore if we have
an SME over on the right here that is
selling goods to another SME in a
different country on the left-hand side
here then through a menu that is
provided by IBM to the representative
bank the SME can place the order that
they have it will flow through the
system to the other bank and then to the
other SME and the result of this there
is trust and transparency in all aspects
of the end-to-end trading relationship
between the two SME so how do we deliver
the additional trade chain project and
what technologies that were using as we
look at this diagram we can see we're
talking about a four tier architecture
so at the center we have a hyper ledger
fabric blockchain Network which is
committing the order of transactions on
to the ledger itself onto the blockchain
this is supported on an IBM cloud on the
outer of next ring we have the peers
these are the nodes within the
blockchain network one node per trading
Bank we then have the application tier
that interfaces downstream to the
blockchain network itself an upstream to
the user interface that is provided by
the banks to give access to their
clients we're using API Connect
to deliver and manage the interfaces we
also have the option of providing M cube
as a messaging layer to interface into
legacy systems and then finally the
presentation layer which is what the SME
actually sees in the context of his
transaction with the bank the value to
the market of the digital trade chain
increases with the number of
participants
therefore we fully expect the digital
trade chain to expand in terms of banks
and SMEs and geographically
you
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