Day: June 1, 2017

Wall Street bank JP Morgan has made a strategic investment in a fintech startup focused on trade finance.

Cleareye.ai operates a platform that aims to automate as much of the trade finance process as possible including document analysis and compliance.

JP Morgan is already a Cleareye customer, and for the last year it has been using the fintech’s ClearTrade platform to map data from the nearly 4 million documents it receives annually directly onto the back’s back-office systems.

The strategic alliance between Cleareye and JP Morgan’s trade and working capital group comes at a time when the trade finance market is undergoing a digital transformation in a bid to reduce the amount of manual processes in what is a heavily paper-based market.

“Future proofing trade operations has been at the forefront of J.P. Morgan’s digital strategy in Trade & Working Capital,” said James Fraser, global head of trade & working capital for JP Morgan.

“A manually intensive industry loaded with paper and lacking standardization, burdened by an increasing cost base, needs real innovation in order to transform.”

No financial details of the investment were disclosed.

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Swift is working with more than a dozen financial institutions and market infrastructures to test the use of its messaging network as a means to instruct the transfer of tokenised value over a range of public and private blockchain networks.

The fresh initiative follows a proof-of-concept conducted with Chainlink last year on the development of a Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) that would connect Swift to multiple blockchain networks.

Tom Zschach chief innovation officer, Swift, says there’s unlikely to be a single prevailing blockchain network.

“We would expect to see a multitude of different platforms emerging, each serving different customer segments with their own bespoke capabilities and requirements,” he says. “In such a highly fragmented ecosystem, it would simply not be feasible for financial institutions to connect to each and every platform individually. That’s why the community is working with Swift to develop an interoperability model that would enable access to different platforms globally.”

The new set of experiments will see Swift collaborate with the likes of Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Citi, Clearstream, Euroclear, Lloyds Banking Group, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX) and The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) on a series of potential implementations.

The first use case will involve the transfer of tokenised assets between two wallets on the same public blockchain network (Ethereum Sepolia testnet). The second involves the transfer of tokenised assets from a public blockchain (Ethereum) to a permissioned blockchain. And a third use case will test the transfer of tokenised assets from Ethereum to another public blockchain.

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