We recently had the opportunity to talk to Henry Ma, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer of WeBank. Recently, WeBank, the world’s leading digital bank in China, and OpenNodes, a deep tech ecosystem platform backed by IMDA and powered by Tribe collaborated on a solution.

They joined hands to offer the financial blockchain platform, FISCO BCOS, as an ‘innovation playfield’ to technology students and academics in Singapore. The move is aimed at advancing blockchain use within the academic community and encouraging them to pioneer innovations that can shape the future of different industries. This is our first part of the interview.

Please explain the significance of this FISCO BCOS solution?

WeBank’s vision is to offer the best-of-breed Open Consortium Chain technologies for the market. An Open Consortium Chain is meant to enable consortium members to jointly provide services for the general public. Together with the FISCO open-source working group, we open-sourced the consortium chain software which we named FISCO BCOS in 2017.

Open-source is the solid foundation of FISCO BCOS. Consortium chain technology is not a one-size-fit-all solution for developers and businesses. By going open-source, we are able to take away a large part of the entry barriers and lower the costs and risks involved in the adoption of blockchain technology, which in return, attracts more individual developers and corporate entities to join our community and participate in its continuous improvement.

As of today, more than 10,000 individuals and 500 enterprise community members contribute their innovative suggestions and practical feedback for the continuous enhancement of FISCO BCOS.

They developed hundreds of applications based on FISCO BCOS, with more than 60 applications already in real production, encompassing areas like finance, supply chain, education, judicial services, government services, public welfare, copyrights protection, and others.

Organizations can use FISCO BCOS like LEGO blocks to build solutions according to their business needs. They might also find it useful to leverage the design templates, development tools, governance console, etc. that come with the underlying platform for faster development in this highly competitive market.

Developers are welcome to join the FISCO BCOS community. Other than leveraging the existing FISCO BCOS functionalities, they also contribute to improve FISCO BCOS and can jointly explore the potential of consortium chain use cases in different industries.

These days, with automation, in the form of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) becoming more prevalent in supply chain finance, the finance industry is undergoing a real change…how does this FISCO BCOS solution fit into this narrative?

In 2018, WeBank has developed a digital-only supply chain finance platform based on FISCO BCOS and a series of technologies including facial recognition, OCR, NLP, smart contract and sentiment analysis.

In traditional supply chain finance services, KYC and credit underwriting processes are both time-consuming and labour-intensive. As a result, banks are reluctant to lend to SMEs and mainly serve large enterprises. It is therefore both difficult and expensive for SMEs to get access to credits from banks.

WeBank’s digital-only supply chain finance platform provides account payables factoring finance and financial management services on a consortium chain. Bank invites corporates (anchors) and suppliers to join the platform.

Our supply chain finance platform is built using FISCO BCOS, and fully facilitates the real-time financial clearing services, registration of due diligence information and secure data sharing among consortium members. Thus far, the platform has already processed more than 20,000 assets and issued more than 10 billion yuan worth of loans.

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About the author

Anil Prabha

Editor In Chief

Anil started his career in journalism all the way back in 2003. After traversing the sphere of editorial, corporate communications and advertising, he has now come full circle and is back in the world of journalism. He believes in the power of the written word, and its ability to enthrall, delight and inform the reader.