Trade Finance SIG Mid-year report 2021

Special Interest Group

Trade Finance Special Interest Group (CMSIG)

Report Author(s)

Andrea Frosinini SIG Chair

TFSIG Overall Health

This year it has been great to see the SIG meeting attendance to continue to grow consistently, with up to 80 people at times. This has partially been due to our ability to leverage the TFSIG Linkedin website and also meeting topics touched so far have been of great interest with notable guest speakers helping drive attendance.  The creation of the first LinkedIn site for a SIG turned out to be a winning choice as so far it has managed to gather an audience of more than 1,200 practitioners from both BC and TF space.

The TFSIG meetings are held on a bi-weekly basis, usually at an APAC region-friendly time slot (8:30am BST) but increasingly we have also had meetings to cater for the America timezone in the afternoon BST. We have also have at times live-streamed on the Hyperledger YouTube Channel.

Issues

In spite of the good attendance, we still have not been able to realise our ambition to contribute some SIG focused projects. This we hope to do in the future 
We are finalizing the change in the governance to a co-chair structure with Andrea Frosinini and Markr Cudden. This we hope will help us better scale and create wider collaboration and contribution. 

Activity in the Past Quarter

The TFSIG has had great participation and has been particularly successful in attracting increasing involvement from international institutions involved in TF a key success factor for future projects.
During the first semester we focused our activities around the international adoption of ML ETR and the shaping up of DLT-native standards and solutions.
Of particular interest, were the following meetings:

• A Primer on DLPC: A New Financial Asset and Standard for Global Trade (Feb 10th)
• How to apply DLTs to negotiable instruments thanks to legal and regulatory developments (March 16th)
• GLOBAL TRADE: trade finance and logistics intertwined (Apr 12th)
• https://www.hyperledger.org/learn/webinars/paperless-promissory-notes-on-dlpc (Apr 20th)
• MLETR Legal Principles and Implementation & Singapore Trade Trust (Apr 26th)
• Call to strengthen Open Collaboration among all Hyperledger Working Groups, Special Interest Groups and Chapters (Jun 15th)

Planned Work Products

1. "Breaking the silos / bridging the silos" project;
2. Hyperledger Cactus in a Trade and Trade Finance cycle (w/Peter Somogyvari of Accenture);

Participant Diversity

As you would expect in trade there is a very diverse membership with global representation from nearly every continent, incl North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Middle East, South Asia, SEA, Korea, Japan, China, Australasia, etc. Gender diversity is still a challenge. We want to invite more presentations from women leaders in Trade and Trade Finance. 

Date Published

2021-08-11