- Consulting giant Accenture announced it is making a strategic investment in Dublin-based TradeIX through its Accenture Ventures subsidiary
Consulting giant Accenture announced it is making a strategic investment in Dublin-based TradeIX through its Accenture Ventures subsidiary. TradeIX’s open platform utilizes distributed ledger technology to facilitate the flow of goods, services, transactions, and information within a secure environment for global trade. The terms of the equity deal were undisclosed.
Currently, trade depends on time-consuming manual processes that are costly and tedious to reconcile. However, distributed ledger technology enables new ways to share data. And it also fully automates financial and accounting processes thus increasing productivity and working capital while reducing overall risk for banking parties.
“Building on TradeIX’s solid foundation across the banking community, this relationship will help companies unlock trapped value in data silos across key operational processes, such as finance, accounting, and supply chain,” says Melanie Cutlan, managing director of blockchain services for Accenture Operations. “Our goal is to scale this capability to help organizations achieve touchless payable and receivable processes within a secure and trusted environment — ultimately transforming how they conduct business with each other.”
In conjunction with the agreement, Accenture will work with TradeIX to bring to market new use cases beyond banking. And it will address the needs of buyers and sellers within trade finance.
“With our global footprint expanding exponentially across both banks and their corporate clients, this alliance with Accenture is instrumental in us achieving our ambitions in making trade more transparent, smarter and better connected internationally,” added TradeIX CEO and co-founder Robert Barnes.
Going forward, the companies will work together to develop touchless finance processes like procure-to-pay and order-to-cash. And this initiative will further expand the Marco Polo Network — which is a joint undertaking of over 30 leading banks, corporations, and technology providers that are enabling simple and secured sharing of trade-related data between financial institutions and their corporate clients to include buyers, suppliers, logistics, etc. Plus Accenture will also serve as a preferred implementation partner for the Marco Polo Platform.
