Today, blockchain firm MonetaGo announced that Indian fintech Finovate Capital is adopting its trade finance anti-fraud solution for its 15+ lenders. Finovate provides invoice discounting and supply chain financing to SMEs and corporates in India.
Trade finance fraud is a substantial risk for lenders, which may deter them from providing credit to companies, especially smaller ones. Finovate has partnerships with banks, non-banking financial companies (NBFCs), small finance banks, and other lenders. By integrating MonetaGo, Finovate will create a digital fingerprint of the invoices preventing duplicate financing in its ecosystem.
The blockchain solution will also authenticate invoices with India’s Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) database and verify the eWay Bill submitted with National Informatics Centre (NIC). This would enable Finovate and its lenders to map the risk profile of an applicant, and speed up the process of trade financing.
“MonetaGo’s Fraud Prevention Solution is unique as it mitigates the double financing risk while helping MSME customers in straight-through-financing of invoices with no manual intervention thus reducing cost, time, and the effort in ensuring the availability of funds,” said Akshat Birla, Founder and CEO of Finovate Capital.
Finovate is fast-growing but still relatively young, having launched in November 2018. Since then it has processed Rupees 1.5 billion in transactions according to YourStory, the equivalent of $20 million.
MonetaGo’s take on blockchain and supply chain finance is a little different from other solutions. It integrates with existing systems to provide added fraud protection, instead of creating a new network for trade finance with lenders and other participants.
Initially, the company was leveraging Hyperledger Fabric, but later made a shift to R3’s Corda Enterprise.
The blockchain firm’s Indian relationship is well documented, and it previously worked with SWIFT India to integrate the solution for banks in the country. During its initial launch, MonetaGo held talks with the Reserve Bank of India and launched its anti-fraud blockchain with three trade finance networks.
