Remember this spring when Ripple’s $28 million series A round overshadowed same-day news of the company’s expansion to Asia?
This week we learned that distributed-ledger technology from Ripple is driving a blockchain-based invoice trading platform built by Standard Chartered Bank, DBS Bank, and the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore.
Ripple CEO Chris Larsen demonstrated the Ripple protocol at FinovateSpring 2013.
“This custom solution was the result of a collaborative effort by many industry players with a wealth of experience in trade finance,” Chris Larsen, Ripple CEO said. “It is also on the forefront of the trending use of distributed financial technologies in the Asia-Pacific region.”
The platform, currently in proof-of-concept stage, converts invoices into digital assets on a distributed ledger. Parties involved get cryptographic identities, which enables the invoice information to be shared by banks (for example, to avoid duplicate financing) without revealing identifiable information.
This last issue is significant enough for FIs. But other potential applications of distributed-ledger technology like Ripple are already being considered. Talking with GTReview, Standard Chartered’s Gautam Jain, global head of digitization and client access for transaction banking, says the technology can also be extended to other trade instruments, such as bills of lading. “We believe that the assembly of all the various documentation and processing stages involved in a trade transaction can happen on a distributed ledger,” Jain told GTR. He added that he thinks the platform, which took six months to develop, can be commercialized in 2016.
Founded as Open Coin in 2012 and rebranded as Ripple in October, the company demonstrated the Ripple network at FinovateSpring 2013. Ripple is headquartered in San Francisco.