BIS Innovation Hub And The Hong Kong Monetary Authority Announce Techchallenge Winners

Today, the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub (BISIH) center in Hong Kong SAR and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) has disclosed the name of the TechChallenge winners - Digitising Trade Finance Initiative that was launched in August to highlight the scope for new technologies to digitalize the mechanism of trade finance.

The TechChallenge initiative was administered by the Deloitte Asia Pacific Blockchain Lab in collaboration with the judges from the Asian Development Bank, the Global Shipping Business Network, the Institute of International Finance, the International Chamber of Commerce, Oxford University, the People's Bank of China, the Trade Finance Global (TFG), the TradeLens, the Trade IX & the Marco Polo Network, the Wolfsberg Group, the World Economic Forum, and the World Trade Organization.

The winners were selected from a total of 103 technology solutions submitted by candidates worldwide to three main complicated statements - Connecting Digital Islands and Increasing Network Size and Effects; Trade Finance Inclusion for SMEs; and TradeTech infrastructure for Emerging Markets. The participants have been invited to display their submissions at the Hong Kong Fintech Week - A virtual event that will run from 2nd to 6th of November.

"Receiving innovative tech solutions from companies based all over the world shows that technology has significant potential to improve trade finance processes, ranging from very large institutional trade finance to SMEs at the grassroots level. We look forward to seeing further development of the proposals and new prototypes in the months ahead.”

Benoît Cœuré, Head of the BISIH

“The HKMA is pleased to have received an enthusiastic response even amid the pandemic and is impressed by the quality of the submissions. We believe that the winning proposals, when further developed, hold great potential for addressing some long-standing pain points of the global trade finance business. We look forward to the next steps and continuing our close collaboration with the BISIH.” Edmond Lau, Senior Executive Director of the HKMA   

There are 17 winners and runners-up of the TechChallenge competition to point-out the scope of new technologies to improve trade finance. The winners include- Business Big Data Inc., eCOM Asia Ltd., EMALI.IO Ltd., essDOCS Ltd., Forms Syntron Information (HK) Ltd., FreightAmigo Services Ltd., HashKey Group, iLoan, KYC-Chain Ltd., Linklogis International Company Ltd., OneConnect Financial Technology Co., Ltd., PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting Hong Kong Ltd., Refinitiv Hong Kong Ltd., Standard Chartered and University of Hong Kong-SCF FinTech Academy, Sedicii Innovations Ltd., Velotrade Management Ltd., and WeBank Co., Ltd.

About the BIS Innovation Hub

Established in 2019, The main purpose of the BIS Innovation Hub is to figure-out and develop deep insights into the complex trade financial technological trends in significance to their relevance to central banks to identify the development of public goods for improved functioning of the global financial system.

Source :

https://www.bis.org/press/p201102.htm