VeChain, Mastercard and Alipay are among the few major players backing the new APAC Provenance Council. It has already secured millions in funding for supply chain tracking and financing pilots throughout the Asia Pacific region.
The consortium will provide comprehensive solutions for authenticating and tracking food, wine and produce using blockchain, with a particular focus on the $76 billion of exports from Australia to China.
VeChain, Mastercard and Alipay Join Australia-China Supply Chain Consortium https://t.co/UCthB3vWjw — APAC Provenance Council (@ApacCouncil) May 4, 2020
Trade financing will be courtesy of Mastercard outside of China, and Alipay Australia for goods headed to China. Products could be tracked using VeChain as the public blockchain or Mastercard Provenance as the permissioned ledger.
David Inderias, the co-founder and CEO of Fresh Supply Co., a core vendor behind the Provenance Council said Mastercard and Alipay enabled the consortium to offer instant payments stating:
“[We offer] the ability to finance and facilitate payments instantly..We can get our clients paid faster, so that means paying by credit. Typically terms of trade is receipt plus 30 days, so it’s exciting to a lot of our clients who can get paid instantly.”
Further adding:
“So what we’re saying is we’re taking B2B, extremely large invoices and fronting them short term credit for 30 days. So you can hold on to your cash so you have more working capital. If I’m a purchaser like Alibaba, I don’t have to use real money, I can use credit, so long as I settle in 30 days. And the benefit of that is the producer gets paid quickly.”
CEO of VeChain Sunny Lu said this new ecosystem would be enormously beneficial:
“The implementation of blockchain technology certainly contributes to buffering the immediate economic impacts of the pandemic for enterprises, and will help improve productivity by unleashing more resources and growth opportunities.”
Apart from blockchain and finance companies, the consortium also includes food industry bodies, standards agencies, packaging and labelling service providers.
The core commercial vendors behind the Provenance Council are all Australian:
Supply chain integrations and middleware company Fresh Supply Co.
CSIRO-backed digital fingerprinting company Laava
Provenance authentication outfit Source Certain International
Inderias said FSC already offers blockchain-verified trade financing of $80,000 a week in partnership with Mastercard for a major Australian dairy exporter and is in the process of integrating one of the country’s largest seafood exporters which accounts for hundreds of millions of exports annually.
The CEO of Blockchain Australia, Nicholas Giurietto supports the council:
“The National Blockchain Roadmap identified agricultural supply chains as a key area where blockchain and adjacent technologies can transform our national capability. The formation of the APAC Provenance Council is a great step forward that will allow us to move forward with projects that will enhance the transparency, efficiency and management of agricultural and other supply chains.”
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Unsplash