Today it was announced that Brazil’s Bradesco is joining blockchain trade finance network Marco Polo. The network offers trade finance solutions such as receivable discounting, factoring and payment commitment with plans for more. The ultimate aim is to enable efficiencies by radically reducing paperwork and reconciliations.
Banco Bradesco is one of the largest financial services companies in Brazil with 28 million current account holders. It has participated in at least three payment related blockchain initiatives. These include JP Morgan’s Interbank Information Network for payment information, IBM’s World Wire cross border payment network, and Ripple. It’s also an investor in enterprise blockchain company R3.
Marco Polo network participants can experiment with the technology before developing their own differentiated offering on the trade platform. One of Marco Polo’s differentiators is ERP integration, and to date it has solutions for Microsoft Dynamics 365, Xero and the award-winning Marco Polo Oracle Netsuite app. This means a corporate has a single interface to access a multibank network.
“We’re now focused on leveraging the best technology to develop new trade finance solutions for our corporate banking customers,” said Roberto Medeiros, Bradesco’s Head of International and Trade Finance. “The expertise of the Marco Polo Network, the forward-looking vision and the end user-focused approach convinced us that we had found the optimum place to succeed.”
The existing group of public Marco Polo members includes Alfa Bank, Anglo Gulf Trade Bank, Bangkok Bank, Bayern LB, BNP Paribas, Commerzbank, Danske Bank, DNB, Helaba, ING, LBBW, Natixis, Natwest, OP, Raiffeisen Bank, SMBC, S-Servicepartner and Standard Chartered.
Last week Marco Polo announced the addition of Raiffeisen Bank to evaluate and pilot the platform. Raiffeisen added coverage of central and eastern Europe. With Bradesco, the geographic scope extends to South America.
TradeIX develops Marco Polo’s software based on R3’s Corda distributed ledger technology.
