Answering ecommerce business needs in the ecosystem

On of the key milestone in our roadmap is to develop the ecosystem system around the Distichain protocol. Today, we share more about the different stakeholders in the industry.

The B2B commercial ecosystem is vast and complex, comprising of multiple functions across the entire value chain — importers, exporters, freight forwarders, logistics providers, banks, insurers, credit agencies, and government agencies, to name a few. All these players in the ecosystem orchestrate their operations to such precision in order to ensure timely delivery of goods across the world. Frequently this orchestration misses a beat leading to disruptions and delays. In Industry 4.0, the challenge is digitising this entire operation while ensuring the needs of all stakeholders are met.

In the realm of B2B goods trading, companies relying on this ecosystem to deliver their business objective are:

• Manufacturers
• Distributors
• Wholesalers
• Retailers

Large multinational manufacturers and global retailers will move into industry 4.0 integrating their systems in a private ecosystem, digitising their operations. But what about the smaller companies who stand without the means or knowhow?

Technology today has allowed Distichain to create a blockchain-based platform that addresses these companies directly, thereby improving and elevating the quality of work done in the B2B trading space.

The world is increasingly connected, and trade should not be an exception. Having a singular platform allows buyers, sellers, and all parties involved gain easy access to each other, globally. By combining AI and Blockchain technology, we create a secure B2B e-commerce ecosystem that brings together these companies and all the key support functions to create a seamless end-to-end transaction experience. From finding your desired inventory needs to product delivery in buyers warehouses, Distichain’s ecosystem provides the answer to companies’ B2B business needs.

Save on operating costs and improve efficiency

In order to reduce operating costs, Distichain’s platform integrates directly with logistics providers, banks, and insurance companies to eliminate intermediaries & process complexities.

Time and cost are of the essence with such large trading volumes involved. To facilitate quick trades, the platform aggregates data across the entire ecosystem to provide insights that aid decision-making, and then integrates agnostically with the user’s ERP systems. This allows for intelligent results to be generated, recommending actions to maximise profitability, optimising inventory holding, and improve forecasting accuracy.

Reduce risk exposure across operations

Trust is inherent in the blockchain, with smart contracts defining roles, responsibilities, and limitations on each party such that risk in trading with virtual “strangers” is mitigated. Coupled with trade finance, smart contracts generated with each transaction secure trading by holding that trade finance virtually in escrow across the agreed credit period. It is released once payment is executed and can be reused again in upcoming transactions.

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About Distichain

The Distichain founders comprise of experts with a combined experience of 45 years of experience across multiple categories within the consumer goods industry. The founders have been working in multinationals and large distribution organizations, and have served in General Management positions for 20 of the 45 years, leading large organizations with complex Regional Value Chains. What makes the team stand out is that along with the capacity to understand the heart of the issues surfacing the B2B industry, they are technology enthusiasts as they themselves witnessed a technological revolution as smartphones and apps emerged to fundamentally change the mobile handset businesses they managed. They can draw out a clear vision of how to capitalize on the identified opportunity as we enter the 4th industrial revolution.

Haisam Jamal (Co-Founder, Leadership)

What motivated you to start Distichain?

Across my 20 year career in large consumer goods MNCs & distribution operations, the B2B wholesale business had not developed and is still very limited. Lack of trust & data dominated and moving to a B2B e-commerce platform was far too costly considering our low channel margins. With blockchain & AI we saw an opportunity to eliminate risk and lower costs significantly.

What has been the biggest challenge so far?

Like any startup we face multiple challenges to get the business rolling. Creating the ecosystem required is a particular challenge since blockchain use cases are still in their early stages and while we find our market fit, potential partners (large corporations & other startups) are also finding theirs.

Wassim Merheby (Co-Founder, Strategy)

Where do you draw inspiration for Distichain’s strategic direction?

Being an entrepreneur is a passion for me. I built a distribution and services business in 2010 and experienced first-hand the pain points of current B2B e-commerce businesses.

I got inspired by B2C e-commerce rise in the last 10 years, since the start of Amazon and other similar marketplaces and the spread of credit cards globally.

Distichain strategy is to render B2B trading as easy as B2C marketplaces by automating business processes and offering credit security.

What are some of Distichain’s biggest strategic hurdles and how have you overcome them?

Distichain’s biggest strategic hurdles are trust and integration. Integration is addressed by adoption of private Blockchain platform Hyperleger or similar. Trust is established through smart contracts backed by Bank guaranteeing the transactions and Distichain trade credit insurance to secure sellers’ credit extended to buyers. In addition, the adoption of Digital KYC ensures that all players are certified before accessing the platform.

Smrithi Raj (Project Management)

What drew you to join Distichain?

Distichain is being developed on the edge of what’s possible technologically. It offers us a very steep learning curve on the benefits of integrating Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence.

Which part of Distichain’s platform do you find most revolutionary?

The most challenging components were: Smart contract automation, Smart ERP plug-in, Negotiation and mediation engine.

Sindhuja CK (Development)

What are some of the challenges in developing Distichain’s platform? How did you solve them?

Blockchain is not easy to integrate and some features need very meticulous attention of users. We needed to find the ultimate solution to ensure that the user’s experience is as simple as they are used to today. This is achieved with digital KYC verification for example.

Distichain connects to many service providers. Many are still developing their APIs for integration of their solutions. We needed to keep our solution as agnostic to communicate with integrators APIs and log the transactions across different Blockchain infrastructure. This was achieved by teaming with some leading development companies across the Globe.

What inspired you to join the Distichain team?

Distichain is at the centre of trade and commerce automation. The solution offers automation tools for involved industries such as banking, logistics and insurance. It is expected to be a joy-ride delivering and seeing Distichain achieve its potential.

Mohammed Arif Ansari (Operations)

Which aspect of Distichain’s operations do you find most rewarding?

Building a platform of this scale, using technologies of the Future namely Blockchain and AI, with multiple product categories, with hundreds of partners across different service areas, setting up regional trading hubs across major locations and recruiting in-country agents spread all over the globe, this is quite exciting and challenging and at the same time the most rewarding part of our Operations.

What’s Distichain’s biggest operational advantage over other B2B e-commerce trading platforms?

None of the other B2B E-commerce platforms have got all the service providers(Logistics, Insurance, KYC/AML, Banks etc) in one secure, seamlessly integrated, GDPR compliant platform. Also, almost none of them have the option of trading anonymously, that too at such a low transaction commission rate.

Lynn Itani (Marketing)

With so many key stakeholders in Distichain’s ecosystem, who do you find it most challenging to market to and why?

As a disruptor of traditional B2B business models, it will be challenging to engage and bring together stakeholders. Change is always difficult and our focus will be on change agents that can see our vision and the tremendous benefits it brings to participants. This will shake the status quo and create a snowball effect.

Where do you draw inspiration for your work at Distichain?

My source of inspiration is the team. Every player involved is working with passion and determination — they only see SUCCESS! This spurs creativity and drives me to approach marketing from a holistic perspective. Inspiration is contagious, and my aim is to spread it onto Distichain’s community.

Follow us as we share more about Industry 4.0 and Distichain technology on medium and our socials.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/distichain
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/distichain/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/distichain
Website: www.distichain.com

In today’s technology-driven world, companies across the globe are experimenting and adding into process the latest advancements in order to create greater efficiencies and smarter matching of stakeholders.

It is no surprise that AI will play a huge role in supply chain management, allowing your B2B chain to become high value efficient trade flows. It should be designed to empower you with information to help you make quick and accurate business decisions. How Distichain does this is to use an ERP system that works as an agnostic tool pulling info from the chain and recommending actions to avoid losses on inventory, increasing inventory turns and optimizes inventory holding through just in time purchases and order forecasting.

As you can imagine, this helps to reduce the number of touchpoints and hence drastically decreases the complexity of processes. Pain points of trading businesses, such as navigating networks and relationship-building which we’ve raised previously, thus gets eliminated in through the introduction of AI.

Traceability and transparency are of paramount importance in any B2B supply chain. As Distichain leverages on both blockchain and AI technology, the benefits of blockchain in providing a marketplace of real time information and consensus allows for AI to be more accurate in analysing predictive behaviour.

Business intelligence also becomes accessible via the metadata of the platform using the AI engine. In Distichain, our AI provides you trends and recommendation of the products and pricing based on the history of data and predictive analytics for identifying buyer behaviour.

This means you wield power in your hands to make more informed and wise business decisions than before. So why hold on to the current way of doing B2B trading?

This is Industry 4.0. This is the future.

Follow us as we share more about Industry 4.0 and Distichain technology on medium and our socials.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/distichain
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/distichain/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/distichain
Website: www.distichain.com

How Distichain is leading the solution for your B2B trading payment terms conundrum

We’ve previously covered the fact that the current B2B e-commerce environment is an incredibly risky one plagued by a lack of trust between parties involved. As a result, companies generally are limited to a few trading partners they trust, diminishing their commercial flexibility and their profits. Let us break it down for you:

Today B2B e-commerce is risky, sellers have no way to offer credit and ensure payments will be received, and buyers are tasked with having to make payments in advance, putting them at risk of not receiving stock after payment. With high value transactions putting so much at stake, the only solution is to use offline bank trade finance, which are generally letters of credit, for each transaction which is costly, timely, and tedious.

Moving forward into Industry 4.0, blockchain technology allows us to solve this security problem. Distichain enters the ecosystem to alleviate the situation by creating a platform that has the ability to offer secure credit payment terms to anybody on the platform.

How so?

“The nature of blockchain allows for a permissioned and private environment to be created, that automatically requires multi-signature verification to generate smart contracts. This means that all actors involved in a transaction will be required to sign off and put forth their promised collaterals before any cross-party transactions occur. Thus, this creates a layer of trust and security between the different stakeholders.”

Should any stakeholder default on their payment, smart contracts in Distichain will trigger an API request to the guaranteeing financial institution, based on the trade finance the user in question had put up.

What could this process flow look like in a real-world use-case? Distichain’s B2B trading platform employs this process in the following manner:

Step 1: A transaction is agreed among a buying and a selling Distichain user. This triggers a digital agreement that will contain information about the product(s), price, quantity, and credit payment terms involved in the transaction.

Step 2: A smart contract is created to execute this agreement. This smart contract will manage the escrowing of the buyer’s trade finance line, and will generate additional documents for the service providers involved in the transaction e.g. insurance providers, inspectors. These additional documents are additional ‘agreements’, reiterating the smart contract creation process.

Step 3: Child smart contracts are created for each additional service provider. These smart contracts again manage the escrowing of fees pertaining to the services the buyer is purchasing, ensuring that money is paid out based on the agreed credit payment terms.

Step 4: Upon Buyer’s receipt of goods, the smart contract executes the rest of the functions.

The smart contract instructs the release of payment to the service providers. It also keeps track of payment receipt from the Seller. Should a default in the payment occur, it triggers an API call to the guaranteeing trade finance to collect on the trade finance put up by the seller.

Step 5: The transaction is now complete, and all stakeholders received their respective goods, services, or payments.

Distichain goes a step further in ensuring bad actions are discouraged in this environment. By requiring all users to register on the platform and undergo KYC, Know-Your-Business (KYB), AML, and government sanction list checks upon sign-up, the platform creates an additional layer of trust that transactions will only occur between a network of trustworthy parties. With Distichain, you can trade comfortably with no risk and gain access to a powerful network to scale your business with.

This is Industry 4.0. This is the future.

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Website: www.distichain.com

As per a research conducted by Frost and Sullivan, B2B e-commerce sales are potentially valued at to be valued over $6.6 trillion by 2020 globally while B2C is valued to be worth $3.2 trillion. Yet B2B potential is still not fully realized due to pain points that still plague the industry.

1. Lack of trust forces lengthy trade finance processes

Online trading of consumer goods poses a big challenge with the trustworthiness of the participants. Securing money for your goods is either cash in advance, thus exposing the buyer, or via trade finance (generally LCs) which are tedious, time consuming and expensive to process for each transaction.

2. Transaction costs eat up tight margins

Currently the cost of doing business online is anywhere between 5 to 8% or even more on most B2B e-commerce platforms. With high values and low margins this becomes a barrier to entry for most businesses.

3. Lack of operational efficiency with numerous transactions in bulk trade

In our hyper-connected world, global supply chains are spreading across continents and nations. Yet global trade is still very inefficient. Logistics, insurance, inspections, and documentation are mostly manual and complex relying on multiple email communication streams.

Does this mean trading companies need to live with these pain points? Definitely not!

Distichain seeks to leverage on technology to serve as the middleman that will bring to the ecosystem an unparalleled level of vendor matching, automated supply chain where security replace need for trust and relationship building. Trading companies hence can look forward to expounding on the huge potential of their industry.

This is Industry 4.0. This is the future.

Follow us as we share more about Industry 4.0 and Distichain technology on medium and our socials.

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