Dun & Bradstreet, an American business services company, plans to launch a service that is built on the open-source Ethereum blockchain platform, for vetting partners and conducting transactions in trade finance, Dun & Bradstreet executives told Wall Street Journal.
According to the reports by WSJ, Saleem Khan, vice president of data innovation at Dun & Bradstreet said that by using the distributed ledger technology, the company will confirm trade finance transactions faster than the traditional methods used by banks shippers, suppliers and other involved in such partnerships.
Khan added that a version of blockchain-based ‘financial supply chain’ would allow trading partners to confirm their identities and the terms of contracts through secure, immutable digital records that are stored on Dun & Bradstreet’s blockchain. “We want to make sure our content is available in this way,” he said.
Customers can now access to a pilot system with a subset of data about 6,500 public companies. The blockchain system matches with DUNS numbers to a unique blockchain identifier code, created for each company. Khan also mentioned that the possible future use of the system would include advisory services where the company would suggest compatible trading partners for customers based on analyzing data from blockchain.
The company did not provide a specific timeframe for the official launch of the blockchain based system.
