Nordic bank SEB has teamed up with Finnish industrial group Wärtsilä on a secure data sharing experiment involving the exchange of digital Letters of Credit.
In the prototype, the document exchange between Wärtsilä and SEB - which is normally done by mailing PDFs between the parties - was instead been done by exchanging structured data sets.
The trial was done on the Ihan platform, a testbed and toolbox for fair data economy developed by technology company Digital Living International. The integration was built on open standards and APIs, enabling the firms to quickly develop their effort.
SEB says the experiment demonstrates that manual and time-consuming exchange of documents can be replaced by data interchange which enables automated processes.
Companies typically fear sharing key operational data without having control over who can access it and how it is used, but the test platform does not store any data and is built on secure communication between the parties.
"By issuing digital mandates, companies have full control over who can access data and how it can be used. So, this removes a key obstacle for future automation,” says Harri Rantanen, business developer, transaction services, SEB.
Rantanen says the technology can also compliment the Contour blockchain trade finance network of which SEB is a member.
"This can work as a link to scale up the use of Contour. Together with them we will investigate the possibility to use the toolbox we developed for the prototype to simplify integration of new customers and structured L/C data with Contour," he says.