Contour’s solution delivers a streamlined digital application for trade finance over a distributed ledger network, which allows parties to manage their own data while transacting and viewing shared information with their trading partners and service providers.
The move into production follows an extensive period of design, development and testing by over 80 banks and corporates, with trials in 17 countries, and transactions spanning commodities, petrochemicals, energy, metals, retail goods and textiles. The focus throughout this process has been to increase the accessibility of trade finance through an improved and intuitive user experience while maintaining a secure network that will meet the needs of the strictest requirements.
New and existing users will now start the process of migrating to the live production environment to execute transactions on the Contour network, built on R3’s Corda technology.
Trade finance provides not only financing of goods or services in a transaction, but also facilitation of the transaction itself and risk mitigation for the unique risks of cross-border commerce.
Banks and corporates will start using Contour by focusing on the Letter of Credit (LC) process as one of the oldest and most important payment methods in global trade.