As port congestion and shipment delays grasp consumers’ attention worldwide, the pressure grows for optimized supply chains. While fingers point to port operations and capacity constraints, trade finance could use operational advancements as well.
Trade finance produces the credit and insurance needed for global transactions. These transactions are not conducted simply by an importer and exporter. They include each party’s bank, a freight forwarder, the insurer and inspector, customs, document couriers and the ship moving the goods across seas. Among these parties, there are often more than 15 pages of documentation, including thousands of data field exchanges.
This is why Sanjeev Chatrath, the newly appointed chief revenue officer of Singapore startup dltledgers, believes these complicated practices are in need of their own digital transformation — not just for operational improvement but for a more inclusive future of global trade.
“I am a firm believer that technology is a huge enabler for creating a more sustainable world, driving diversity and inclusion through delivering a greater level of efficiency in business,” he told FreightWaves following his appointment, which was announced Monday.
Now, with his 25 years of finance experience from Citigroup, Thomson Reuters and IBM, Chatrath and the team at dltledgers will continue to grow the enterprise solution that allows each global trade party to have transparency of a shipment’s progress.
Using a shared ledger, parties are able to track and record exchanges of data, with every exchange validated by each party, creating a single, standardized record with accuracy that can be trusted.
Shipment delays, fraud and security challenges can become more transparent when applying blockchain technology to global trade.
“Sanjeev is tremendously passionate about the goals of our business and solving these long-standing challenges global trade finance is facing,” said founder and Chief Product Officer Samir Neji. “With the long delays we are experiencing, a lot of working capital is getting locked up, which impedes the financial performance of a lot of corporations and is impacting the financial inclusion of small and medium-sized enterprises.”
In April, dltledgers announced it had successfully applied this technology to a $12 million trade transaction with global food companies Cargill and the first large firm on its platform, Agrocorp. The large shipment of wheat from North America to Indonesia took five days to settle, a transaction that normally takes up to 30 days to settle, according to the company.
To date, dltledgers has successfully processed more than $4 billion of global trade transactions with companies including Schneider Electric, Shiseido and Marubeni.
With its technology partners Hyperledger, SAP, Microsoft and Google Cloud, dltledgers has focused on improving trade transactions in regions in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Australasia.
After raising $7 million in its Series A round in March, the company hopes to leverage Chatrath’s leadership and experience on its path toward a pre-Series B raise in Q4. Since 2019, dltledgers has raised a total of $9.5 million, according to Pitchbook.
“We have now reached a stage where we are ready to really scale our platform and partnerships,” said Chatrath. “There is a huge amount of interest from the investor community and I think that is a positive sign for the impact of our business on the future of trade finance.”
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