IBM and the Thailand Blockchain Community Initiative (BCI) jointly announced that its electronic letter of guarantee (eLG) platform and network is now extending the scope and reach of its services and network to businesses of all sizes.
The extended capabilities on the BCI blockchain platform include equipping its network with true hybrid cloud and multi-vendor capabilities, disaster recovery and multi-region high availability.
Commercial banks in Thailand manually issue guarantee letters worth billions of dollars to businesses annually as part of their guarantee process in case a buyer defaults. The negotiation between buyer, seller and bank can take up to nine days and the risk of forged paper documents could leave the seller without recourse.
Through the Thailand Blockchain Community Initiative, now known as BCI (Thailand), 22 banks and 15 companies is said to have joined the blockchain-based platform to support payment obligations, for enterprise auctions and other domestic trading procedures.
The platform went live in late 2019 and currently claims to handle an approximate value of US$ 300,000,000 in guarantee letters. It is said to reduce letter of guarantee issuance time to less than a day. Some member companies purportedly reported seeing a 200% reduction in transaction costs. eLG was designed to reduce the potential for errors and risk of fraud for all parties involved.
Silawat Santivisat “The blockchain platform is significant to BCI as it is aligned to our roadmap of using a hybrid deployment model to grow to overseas markets in the future. The Letter of Guarantee is just the first service offering from BCI. More products will be added in the near future. The platform also sets a strong foundation for BCI to scale and expand our services offerings on top of bringing speed and efficiency to more companies,”
said Silawat Santivisat, Chairman of The Board, BCI (Thailand) Co., Ltd.
Patama Chantaruck
Patama Chantaruck as Vice President for Indochina Expansion and Managing Director of IBM Thailand said,
“IBM is proud to support BCI and its growing consortium in bringing the use of blockchain technology on the highly-secured IBM Cloud environment to address one of Thailand’s key pain points in executing financial transactions. First developed by members of the Thai banking community with IBM Garage for Cloud in 2016, the platform has incorporated best practices in bringing both bank and non-bank ecosystem players together quickly and effectively.”
Large, medium or small companies in Thailand reportedly can start using BCI’s eLG services. Clients have the option to access the BCI portal through different models, including private on-premise access, via the cloud, or via a cloud broker.