TradeLens is a digital platform that empowers businesses and authorities along the supply chain with a single, secure source of shipping data, enabling more efficient global trade. Join us and Daniel Wilson, director of business development at TradeLens / Maersk and Juan-Jose Ruiz, Head of Strategy & Business Development at TradeLens / IBM to find out more about the exiciting TradeLens platform.

Daniel and Juan are jointly responsible for building out the investment case, as well as overseeing and implementing TradeLens mid to long term strategy, and managing third party engagements.

 
What is blockchain?
Today’s traditional ways of storing data, whether cloud native or locally are great if you're able to trust with absolute surety, that the people and the organisations and the systems managing those data will do so essentially, with impunity. You have no risk that the data stored there and the systems will have any way of being challenged or corrupted.

However, we all know that these systems aren't perfect, and they have limiting features on them. Even systems as secure as banks have billions of dollars stolen from them each year. Because something as simple as hacking in and changing numbers in accounts is something that is feasible, given today's technology.

So basically, what blockchain is, is a way of moving away from the centralization of control and authority. It’s moving away trust from a single body and towards a distributed way of managing that information, and a distributed way of managing trust. Essentially what this means it that everybody within a blockchain network has a stake in the management of the system. Everybody has a way of checking the actions and activities of everybody else.

In an environment like supply chains this is very important as the idea of trusts and systems does not exist today as lots of paper and manual process are still being used in managing trade. What blockchain can enable, amongst other technologies, is a way of distributing digitization across the network, without centralising that control in any one party or body.

 
What is TradeLens?

 

Daniel used an analogy of the airport and planes to describe what is TradeLens. For example when Daniel books a flight to Europe from Newark airport in NY with United Airlines, he might find out that his plane is actually operated by Swiss Air on a different type of airplane leaving from a different terminal. However he can still choose his seat and check in using his United mobile app.

Basically, air travel for passengers is great because you have these all in one solutions in front of you on your phone. Containerized shipping isn't like that. A typical container will have an end to end journey that involves as many as 30 organisations such as the port loading the container on the ship, the shipping line who has the ship, the banks providing financing, government's providing certification and clearance and much more.

In those 30 organisations you’re dealing with at least 100 individuals and more than 200 information exchanges in the process of that container journey.

And today, the best case scenario for most of those information exchanges, is an EDI communication protocol, which is 1970s technology, it's batch processing, it's not particularly resilient. Outside of EDI you’re dealing with emails, phone calls, WhatsApp and texting. But in the majority of cases those information exchanges are being done with a lot of paper and faxing.

TradeLens is trying to address this lack of connectivity in three steps: