Last June the WEF issued a white paper analyzing supply chain management and how big the blockchain would grow in the near future. The report ‘Trade Tech – A New Age for Trade and Supply Chain Finance‘, was issued as the result of a partnership with Bain & Company.
The Asian Development Bank predicted that a $1.5 trillion trade deficit is present and the number would only increase to $2.4 trillion by 2025. The prediction is based on the current difficulties faced by smaller businesses in obtaining credit mainly in the region of East Asia and the Pacific.
The distributed ledger technology could offer a solution to close this trade gap, as countries specialize in more industries, allowing the development of a broader range of technologies. The main concerns are the expansion of trading and making it efficient and safe.
A whole chapter of the report called ‘Financing: Suffering under the paper monster‘ examines the problem. Maersk and IBM experimented with tracking one shipping container that was supposed to arrive in the Netherlands from Kenya. The shipping took 34 days and more than ten days were needed to process the documents.
The World Economic Forum agrees that manual, paper-based methods are outdated and create more errors. Their replacement with blockchain technology solutions is expected to have a positive impact on the environment and increase transparency.
Companies would be able to reach their goals easily by using blockchain records. Paper documents can be lost or forged, excluding them from the safe working options list.