The revolution in Trade Finance is here. It is happening now and it is being led by ModulTrade – an innovative project, developing a global platform which may soon revolutionize the cross-border trade across the world. Trade finance has long been seen as the preserve of banks to control and manage. Companies, unless they were big multinational concerns were often limited by choice and then forced to accept fee structures that along with currency risk instruments seriously cut into margins and rendered the whole exercise redundant.
No more, the ModulTrade platform effectively smashes the banking cartels and heralds a new era in freedom to pursue trade deals at minimum cost in time, revenue and process management.
The costs, lack of transparency and time taken to establish letters of credit meant the trade finance process was ripe for disruption. In 2016 four students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) decided to challenge the status quo and launch a platform that would connect in real time buyers and sellers of goods, and put back trust into trading relationships.
The team’s bluechip background in commercial banking and commerce meant they understood the workflows and risk profiles, and being entrepreneurs saw the potential of how blockchain technology could deliver a transformational experience and operating system.
The key insight that the team landed upon was the use of smart contracts and how their application in a closed network would act to cover both the purchase and consignment of goods in real time. Advances in tracking systems and wider improvements in blockchains – the team have settled on the Ethereum network – meant that once the underlying architecture had been specced out, ModulTrade were able to move quickly to deliver a minimum viable project and engage with the potential customer.
Since launching the vision for the platform in September 2017 the team has found themselves in continuous discussions with both investors and businesses who seeing the potential of the system have been keen to become customers and backers of the project. In particular in Asia, in the emerging “One Belt, One Road” economic region the reception has proved to be overwhelmingly positive. This month on a recent trip back to China, ModulTrade signed a number of partnership agreements that will not only support the adoption of the platform as core conduit for trade through the region but will act to create an ongoing demand for MTRc, the ModulTrade token.
So as the ModulTrade token sale enters the last phase of completion investors should take comfort from the fact that: the list of advisors has increased and grown with more technical and market experts joining the team as the full benefits of the platform become apparent. The platform has been tested and is now operational, and working to make “democratization” of trade a reality. And that customers, large scale buyer, are engaged with ModulTrade to put orders on the system and stimulate growth.
Ultimately, all investors have to undertake their own due diligence on any project but in the case of ModulTrade, they have more than honored their commitments as set out in their white paper and have driven themselves to realize the vision, without compromise. So the process of transformation in trade finance is happening, the revolution is real and the chance to be part of it, for a short time, still exists.