Wärtsilä Participates In Paperless Trade Finance Experiment

Recently, with an agenda to digitalize the process of Export Letter of Credit which is presently being taken care of manually and by email utilizing paper records and PDF documents, the technology group Wärtsilä has taken part in the innovative co-creation project. With the aforesaid co-operation, it can be clearly stated that these manual documents can be easily replaced with the safe, secure, and regulated data sets that allow automated processing. This is viewed as an advancement accomplishment. Earlier, Tradeteq signed a deal with  Microsoft to automate trade finance.

In addition to the Wärtsilä assuming the part of an exporter, different organizations who were taking part in this process were SEB, considering as the L/C advising bank, Digital Living International which applied the completely computerized L/C document exchange based on Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra’s information sharing platform known as IHAN testbed, and Nixu Corporation which aided the process through its cyber-secure digital identity and security instruments. The final agenda of this experiment was to demonstrate that corporate information sharing can be initiated technically and functionally with the help of great administration and without the threats of misusing critical business information.   

According to Jarmo Nurmi, Corporate Treasurer at Wärtsilä, “Wärtsilä is effectively and continuously looking for opportunities to boost its efficiency levels in all operational activities, cycles, and dealings. As a worldwide organization, we are continually tackling business transactions with clients and banks globally, and this experiment also consists of joining with qualified partners willing to not only boost the build productivity of these dealings but also to decrease the potential risks. ”

The participating co-makers also highlighted the fact that a database system can enable smoother market practices available which would be easy to apply and coordinate with standard and open application programming interfaces (APIs) regulated by the information sharing and consent management implementation. This mitigates the threat of data duplicity and its implementation without consented access. The DLT adoption amid COVID-19 was also considered an appreciable step by the trade finance industry for recording the transaction details in multiple places at the same time.

This project was started in 2020 with an arrangement based on design-thinking. While the analysis could just cover part of the entire L/C process, it was despite that was capable of determining that automated processing can be done within Trade Finance Partner frameworks. It additionally demonstrated that this can be executed in a platform, framework, and process agnostic way that can be slowly extended.