The trade finance industry has been historically dampened by several pain points including:

• Prolonged paper-intensive process: trade financing has been inundated with long paper trails between all parties and necessary exchange validations. This process is long and exchange of documents takes about five to ten days to complete, if not longer.
• Losses due to high operational costs including cross-border fees, transaction reconciliation, correspondent banking and other transaction fees.
• Lack of transparency and document discrepancies due to multiple platforms involved: since each party across countries operates on different platforms, document discrepancies and miscommunication are common, and the risk of fraud is high.
• Delayed payments due to long verification process by multiple intermediaries, and long effort on reconciliation and auditing.
• Manual and repetitive tasks: traditional trade finance process required manual verifications which involves a lot of mundane and costly human effort which can leave ample room for human errors.
• Fraud and unsecured communication channels: More serious problems could also occur in the event of fraud, where the same batch of goods is being financed multiple times with different banks who do not share the same information. Or, where certain trade documents are faked to obtain financing inappropriately.

The TRICE platform will integrate a wide set of functionalities to help clients manage and process their trade finance transactions from purchase order to payment. It will include three major solutions that will directly address existing pain points :

• A blockchain platform allowing for a secure and efficient processing of commodity trade finance transactions by sharing digital ‘proofs’ and documentations using a consensus mechanism across the board;
• A ‘marketplace’ platform, to facilitate matching of the various stakeholders within the trade finance ecosystem, and reduce barriers for buyers and sellers;
• A compliance control solution, by embedding compliance controls (through warnings and notifications) in-line with UCP 600 global trade finance rules; as well as by profiling of customers (including credit and background checks, KYC, KYCC, AML, TBML and any type of customer profile verification otherwise required and applied by banks);