British banking group HSBC and Dutch bank ING closed the first live financial trade transaction completed with blockchain to finance the shipping of soya bean shipment from Argentina to Malaysia for the food and agriculture conglomerate Cargill. The live financial trade transaction consisted of sending a letter of credit from London-based HSBC to Cargill through the Corda blockchain platform developed by technology consortium R3. According to HSBC, the live financial trade transaction was an end-to-end trade able to reduce Cargill’s document exchange time to 24 hours from what would normally have been a 5 to 10-day process by using the traditional multiplatform process. In an announcement, HSBC said the system is commercially and operatively viable for the digital facilitation of trade. However, before it can progress further, with integrating blockchain into international trade, HSBC explained it needs more banks, ports, shipping companies and customs operations to adopt similar collaborative platforms. This would enable the live financial trade transaction modus operandi to normalize in international trade, in which more than US$ 2 trillion of trade currently depends on the physical exchange of letters of credit. Even though most blockchain developments in shipping to date have tended to focus on the container segment, there have been some notable developments in dry bulk. Last year, Louis Dreyfus sealed the world’s first agricultural commodity trade to use blockchain. Also, Prime Shipping Foundation revealed it was behind the world’s first freight deal settled in Bitcoin. With information from: https://splash247.com/hsbc-ing-cargill-landmark-blockchain-soya-shipment/ https://www.porttechnology.org/news/hsbc_achieves_blockchain_shipment_transaction_success
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