Digital trade platform we.trade announced this month that it has experienced consistent transaction growth of an average of 38% per month throughout 2019. 

we.trade offers guarantees, financing and event based automatic payments via smart contracts to all parties along the trade journey. The platform is equity-backed by some of the world’s biggest banks, including CaixaBank, Deutsche Bank, Eurobank, ERSTE Group, HSBC, KBC, Nordea, Natixis, Rabobank, Santander, Societe Generale, UBS and Unicredit. The platform is developed in association with IBM, using their Hyperledger Blockchain Platform. 

The company released some partially anonymised customer feedback to support the news:

“This platform allows us to significantly cut the processing time of our orders, via real-time data exchange with our suppliers and bank.” - Construction machinery company, France.

“Building up trust in a new supplier takes time. Through we.trade we can immediately start trading with parties that are on the platform.” - Business supplies company, the Netherlands. 

“We decided to innovate and be the first company in Italy to use we.trade, to support a completely digital, linear, transparent and easy-to-monitor order management process.” - Steel manufacturing company, Italy.

Commenting on the news, Ciaran McGowan, we.trade general manager explained: 

“Customer feedback is driving we.trade’s future strategy - our evolution from a trade finance platform to an end-to-end trade platform that includes value added services such as shipping, credit & transport insurance. We will be enhancing our platform with client centric features that include multi-banking, staged- payments, split-shipping and the ability to trade globally across the five continents, creating an open platform that can interconnect with other trade platforms and to business ERP systems.” 

Given the transaction growth throughout 2019 and the very positive customer feedback, we.trade says that it plans to open a public investment round in early 2020 to ensure the platform growth and to meet the expectations of SME and corporate users.