Notes 22 January 2019

Owned by Will Lovell
Last updated: Nov 09, 2020 by Andrea Frosinini
3 min read
  1. Will opened the meeting reminding everyone that the meeting is being recorded and read the anti-trust statement.

  2. New members.  The following new members introduced themselves;
    1. Chase Hughes from EquityUp
    2. Vitaliy Chernov from Altoros
    3. Bill Genovese from Huawei
    4. Andy Graham from IBM
    5. Bobbi Muscara from Ledger Academy
    6. Nathan Aw from OCPC Bank
    7. Fred ? from Santa Clara
    8. Nicki Morris from Ledger Insights
       
  3. Will encouraged all members to add their names to the members directory and thanked Edmund To for his work in building the directory

  4. Scope of Trade Finance.  Vik Kimyani shared a presentation on the scope of trade finance (link to follow).  The key points were;
    1. Trade finance involves risk arbitration between importers and exporters.  Exporters want to be paid in advance as it reduces their risk, but importers don’t want to pay until they have received and inspected the goods. 
    2. Effective trade finance reduces the risk for both parties.  This usually involves a bank or finance institution providing credit, and trusted third party services.
    3. There are a number of ways to do this.  Letters of credit are very popular, but bank guarantees and factoring are used as well.
    4. Vik presented his initial thoughts on an acronym dictionary, and a sample flow diagram (see slide deck for example)
    5. Bobbi Muscara - suggested we extend the acronyms to a terminology page as well
    6. Vitaliy noted that trade finance relationships exit with countries as well as internationally.  He has some slides that describe the workflow for obtaining credit insurance.
    7. You can listen to the presentation on the meeting audio from 12'10".

      ACTION;  Bobbi to contribute some starting content for a terminology page
      ACTION; Vitaliy to share slides for credit insurance workflow

  5. New Wiki.  The SIG wiki has moved to the new confluence platform.
    1. Edmund To and Kevin Leuthardt presented their work on redefining the wiki
    2. Edmund emphasised that he would like as many members as possible to contribute.
    3. He shared a list of questions that the wiki should answer they are;
      1. What is trade finance?
      2. What are the parties involved? Eg, buyer, seller, each representing bank, transportation company, insurer, etc. What parties are required to form the minimum viable ecosystem, i.e. the min. amount of parties to sustainably establish the network benefits?
      3. What are products and services being involved in trade finance? Eg, Letter of Credit, different financing methods, insurance, etc.
      4. What are the problems or inefficiencies with the current system?  What is the value chain of trade finance? What are the user journeys
      5. How blockchain as a technology aim to solve those problems. DLT / blockchain’s value proposition for trade finance; when to apply DLT / blockchain, when to avoid?
      6. What are the different trade finance platforms? Eg we.trade (Hyperledger) eTradeConnect (Hyperledger), others which were built on Corda, Ethereum, etc.
      7. What are the pros and cons of each? [Kevin]: How to ensure (platform / framework) interoperability?
      8. Or even a reference implementation of trade finance using a Hyperledger framework, like Fabric or Sawtooth.
      9. What are governance models for trade finance (enterprise) blockchains (e.g. consortia) with a particular focus on securing attractiveness of platform for both co-initiators as well as later-entrants? On- or / and off-chain governance models?
      10. What are learnings from the day-to-day operation of blockchain networks for trade finance applications (commercial, technical, legal (data, IP, FS regulatory) considerations
    4. ACTION:  Edmund and Kevin to build the wiki as they have described.
       
  6. Items for the next agenda.
    1. Interoperability.
      1. ACTION; Will to contact people who have spoken about interoperability to work together on assembling a presentation 
      2. ACTION; Nicki Morris mixing data between chains with layered blockchains.  (@35 mins?)
      3. ACTION; Vik Kimyani to identify someone in Oracle to speak about interoperability with ERP
    2. Governance comparison
      1. Kevin Leuthardt offered to present on governance comparison at a future meeting.
         
  7. Next meeting is 5th February 2019 at 14:00 UTC.