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In an effort to facilitate European domestic and cross-border trade, the Digital Trade Chain group is creating a distributed ledger framework that connects buyers, sellers, banks and intermediaries to simplify transaction management and tracking.
To that end, the consortium will create a new business facility in the Republic of Ireland, jointly owned by the eight founding banks, that will manage and distribute the proposal, now renamed as "we.trade". It is expected that the new facility will be formed around the end of the year.
"The commercialization of the platform is expected in the second quarter of 2018. Since February 2018, the test clients of the founding banks will be able to use the platform," the consortium said in a statement.
First introduced in January, Digital Trade Chain now includes Banco Santander, along with Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Societe Generale and UniCredit, as well as IBM.
In the coming months, attempts will also be made to attract additional parties to the consortium in addition to financial services. One of the focus areas will be companies involved in the trading process, including shipping - an industry that has seen rapidly growing interest in blockchain technologies in recent months.
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