R3, the blockchain software startup, said its Marco Polo trade finance platform is now deployed in a pilot stage. Several global banks and trade finance technology provider TradeIX are part of the pilot. The firm has earlier successfully completed a proof-of-concept that commenced in September 2017. The banks participating in the POC included BNP Paribas, Commerzbank and ING. It is now expected that more banks and third-party service providers, including credit insurers and enterprise resource planning and logistics providers, would be joining the pilot. R3 aims to develop a fully interoperable open-source trade finance network built with its distributed ledger technology (DLT) product Corda and delivered over TradeIX’s open TIX platform. The solution currently addresses 3 areas of trade finance: risk mitigation, payables finance and receivables finance. R3 is already working with Microsoft, having moved to more deeply integrate the Corda platform with the Azure cloud service.
