The central bank's trading gold blockchain platform helps corporate financing, and national project support breaks through development difficulties

Xinhua News Agency reporter Wu Yu

Source: Xinhuanet

Trade finance is a complex scene spanning multiple subjects and multiple links, involving a wide range of industries and long transaction chains, and requires mutual trust and sharing. In order to break the silo of information and improve the level of mutual trust and facilitation of trade finance, the People's Bank of China launched a trade finance blockchain platform that extensively connects tax, customs, foreign exchange and other departmental information, effectively helping SMEs increase their credit.

When a bank handles trade financing business for customers, if it manually reviews and counts paper trade financing documents, it will not only verify the cost, but also it will be difficult to ensure the accuracy of the information. Repeated financing and false financing will occur from time to time.

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"Trade finance requires the sharing of information among multiple transaction entities, and the frequency of transactions is not high. This naturally matches the technical characteristics of the blockchain." Di Gang, Deputy Director of the Digital Currency Research Institute of the People's Bank of China, introduced September 4, 2018, based on data. The Institute's self-developed blockchain underlying technology, the central bank's trade finance blockchain platform, was launched in Shenzhen on a trial basis. After enterprises enter transaction information, the information cannot be tampered with, and banks can share information with other departments.

Experts said that in each trade scenario, information islands can be cracked by establishing a blockchain. However, if there is no industry consensus technical business standard and mature and reliable cross-chain technology, new information islands will be formed between chains, leading to business Rupture of the lines. Therefore, this cross-sector, cross-scenario trade finance platform led by the central bank is of great significance.

Fan Yifei, deputy governor of the People ’s Bank of China, once said that the People ’s Bank of China will actively work with all parties to continuously optimize and improve financial infrastructure through scientific and technological means, empower financial services to improve quality and efficiency, and support the transformation and upgrading of financial system structure and efficient allocation of financial resources. Improving financial services to the real economy.

The reporter learned from the People's Bank that as a financial infrastructure, the central bank's trading platform takes advantage of its neutrality, professionalism, and authoritativeness, and uses the three major capabilities of peer-to-peer interconnection, inclusive docking, and controllable sharing provided by the blockchain. To further clarify the ownership of data, lower the threshold for data acquisition, and to a certain extent, achieve "total" data sharing between multiple ministries and commissions.

In November 2019, the central bank re-discounted the fast-track project on-chain, which once again enriched the business scenario of the central bank's trading platform. Xing Yujing, President of the People's Bank of China Shenzhen Sub-branch, introduced that the Central Bank's trading platform has run a number of businesses such as multi-level financing of supply chain receivables, cross-border financing, supervision of international trade accounts, and tax filing forms for external payments.

For more than a year since the platform went online, the number of connected banks and businesses has continued to increase. Data show that as of mid-January 2020, there were 44 banks and 485 outlets participating in the promotion and application, and 1898 companies that had business operations, achieving more than 30,000 business on-chain transactions and more than 8,000 business transactions. The cumulative business volume exceeded 90 billion yuan.

According to relevant persons from the Digital Research Institute of the Central Bank, after the launch of the central bank's trading platform, the efficiency of SME loans on the platform has been greatly improved. The time required to process trade financing has been reduced from more than 10 days to more than 20 minutes, and corporate financing costs have also been reduced to Below 6% will help alleviate the difficulties faced by SMEs. At the same time, the use of technical means can reduce personnel exchanges and improve efficiency.

A person in the central bank introduced that the central bank's trading platform has begun its international expansion process. In November 2019, the Central Bank's trading platform and the Hong Kong Trade Links Platform Co., Ltd. signed a memorandum of cooperation to start the interconnection and interconnection of the trading platforms of the two places, to build digital trade financing bridges for trade entities in different economies, and to promote the Belt and Road "Economic and trade exchanges.

The reporter learned that at present, the docking of the two platforms has reached the stage of technical details. In the future, the central bank's trading platform will connect more countries and international organizations with similar platforms to form a widely connected global trade financing highway.

In practice, the construction and development of the central bank's trading platform also faces challenges. Experts said that the central bank's trading platform still has some technical difficulties in cross-chain interoperability, digital identity construction, and blockchain privacy protection. It needs to gather resources from top domestic academic institutions and parties to jointly study multi-source data credible sharing and trade The key issues in the construction of trade finance ecology such as the reengineering of finance in the digital economy era.

Therefore, led by the Digital Research Institute of the Central Bank, in conjunction with financial institutions and academic research units such as the Credit Reference Center of the Central Bank and the Beijing Financial Assets Exchange, they have jointly applied for key technology research and development and application demonstration projects on the open platform for trade finance. Recently, the project has been approved as a key special project of the national key research and development plan, and has received relevant national funding and policy support.

At present, the central bank's trading platform is accelerating ecological construction and nationwide promotion. Di Gang said that after receiving national high-standard project support, the platform will continue to serve the real economy, prevent and control financial risks, and deepen financial reform as the key tasks and core goals, and build a new generation of financial foundation by co-construction, co-management and co-governance Facilities to help China's high-quality economic development.

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