SINGAPORE (THE BUSINESS TIMES) - DBS on Friday (Sept 25) said it is now a bank partner on a newly launched blockchain trade platform developed by a unit of Ant Group.
Called Trusple, the platform uses the blockchain technology of Ant's blockchain business AntChain to facilitiate trade and trade financing.
DBS said in a press statement that it is the first Asian bank partner on the platform. The other bank partners are BNP Paribas, Citibank, Deutsche Bank and Standard Chartered.
Trusple hopes to serve as a platform for distributors and suppliers to trade their products and access trade financing digitally in real-time.
When a buyer or seller generates a digital trade order on the platform, the order will be automatically recorded on the blockchain. This enhances transparency in complex supply chains, fostering greater trust between parties that may not have interacted before, DBS said.
The platform aims to facilitate greater acceptance and adoption of digital trade processes among corporates, DBS said, especially the small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that face many pain-points when it comes to international cross border trade.
DBS, along with other member banks, will offer payment guarantees for all goods traded on the platform. The financing bank will automatically dispatch payment to the seller once the buyer digitally acknowledges the receipt of goods on Trusple.
This mitigates the risk of late payments and allows suppliers to enjoy greater predictability of cash flows, enabling them to better optimise their working capital for strategic opportunities to grow their business.
Member banks can also harness insights from the transactional data between buyers and suppliers to determine the credit quality of the business and offer competitively-priced trade loans through the platform.
DBS group's head of institutional banking Tan Su Shan said the bank's partnership with AntChain underscores its commitment to SMEs in providing the working capital support that is key to their survival in this period of prolonged trade disruptions.
