Dec 16, 2015 | Meghan Elison

Ripple is excited to be part of an innovative trade finance project in Singapore that includes the leading financial institutions in the region. The project leverages theRipple’s distributed ledger (RCL) to underpin a platform for tracking invoices backing loans to suppliers. The platform is built for Singapore, the world’s leading finance and trading hub.

“Ripple’s core technology is a powerful infrastructure solution that dramatically reduces risk and costs associated with asset settlement,” said Chris Larsen, CEO and co-founder, Ripple. “We’re thrilled to see global industry leaders produce solutions for important new use cases of distributed financial technology.”

This trade finance project enables the issuance of invoices into Ripple’s distributed ledger (RCL) to preserve client and commercial information confidentiality, to reduce the risk of duplicate financing by multiple banks, and to allow banks to access a single source of information on the status of invoices seeking financing across all participants.

The trade finance use case is an excellent example of applications for distributed financial technology to solve diverse financial problems. This project makes use of the Ripple’s distributed ledger (RCL) that tracks the ownership of XRP and other digitized assets, including fiat currencies, titles, financial instruments and invoices.

We are pleased to see a variety of players in the financial ecosystem – banks, government agencies and leading enterprise tech companies – exploring and adopting more use cases for distributed financial technology. This custom solution was the result of a collaborative effort by many industry players with a wealth of experience in trade finance. It is also on the forefront of the trending use of distributed financial technologies in the Asia-Pacific region.

Interoperability is key here; as elsewhere in the world, financial systems in Asia-Pacific are fragmented and this public ledger technology will help connect disparate actors and institutions.

Distributed financial technologies are being used to solve an increasingly varied list of problems in the financial ecosystem. Microsoft announced earlier this month that their cloud platform Azure is operating a Ripple validation node.

We look forward to the development of more use cases and the adoption of Ripple and the Interledger Protocol (ILP) as they continue to underpin our overarching vision: the Internet of Value.