IFTA (The International Trade and Forfaiting Association) and XDC Blockchain network will be holding a fintech workshop entitled “Use of Digital assets across Trade Origination and Distribution. The event will be held in Dubai UAE on February 22nd at Emirates Financial Towers.
As per the X feed, the workshop is tailored to IFT members, banks, credit insurers, fintech companies and law firms as well as policy makers, corporates, alternative lenders, family offices, asset managers, and logistics operators.
The topics covered will include MLETR policy developments, digital negotiable instruments, and real-time loan transactions and how tokenization and digital assets are revolutionizing the trade finance and lending practices.
Trade Finance has picked up interest not only from the UAE government but also the banking sector. In September 2023, UAE based Emirates NBD invested in Blockchain enabled Komgo, trade finance platform. As per the press release, the strategic equity investment was made by Emirates NBD’s Innovation Fund, the Bank’s corporate venture fund. The fund created in early 2023, aims to strengthen synergies from strategic partnerships by combining the Bank’s digital ambitions and regional expertise with the agility and technological innovations of fintech companies.
In addition, Blockchain trade finance platform for banks in the UAE, UAE Trade Connect, an e&enterprise company has announced that it has surpassed $27 million in transactions identifying interbank duplicate financing and preventing fraud attempts.
In December 2023, UAE based InvoiceMate, a blockchain enabled invoice financing platform, tokenized a real world asset, an invoice, using the XDC blockchain in its recent pilot. The project used TradeFinex’S open source smart contract standards.
Earlier this year, Dubai’s virtual asset regulator (VARA) announced its plans for 2024 which will include enhancements to its regulatory infrastructure with introduction of real world use cases for tokenized fractionalized market participation using Blockchain as well as TradeFi, DeFi regulations while it has phased out its MVP licensing program
Finally and most importantly the UAE government is supporting tradeFi and the utilization of digital assets. At Davos in January, the UAE government signed an MOU with WEF (World Economic Forum) to support UAE’s new Blockchain and AI enabled Trade Tech initiative. The initiative is designed to accelerate the digitization of international supply chains, enhance customs procedures, and improve developing countries’ access to the global trading system and, as a result, spur a new era of trade growth.
So it seems that this workshop and definitely others to come, are opportune for learning more about the connections between Trade sector and digital assets.
