Accenture Invests in and Forms Strategic Alliance With TradeIX

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) has invested in and formed a strategic alliance with TradeIX, a Dublin-based company whose open platform uses distributed ledger technology to facilitate the flow of goods, services, transactions and information within a secure environment for global trade. Terms of the equity investment were not disclosed.

Current trade relies on time-consuming manual transaction processes that can be costly and hard to reconcile. Distributed ledger technology enables new ways to share data and the full automation of finance and accounting processes, increasing productivity and working capital while reducing overall risk for banking parties.

“Building on TradeIX’s solid foundation across the banking community, this relationship will help companies unlock trapped value in data silos across key operational processes, such as finance, accounting and supply chain,” said Melanie Cutlan, managing director of blockchain services for Accenture Operations. “Our goal is to scale this capability to help organizations achieve touchless payable and receivable processes within a secure and trusted environment — ultimately transforming how they conduct business with each other.”

As part of the agreement, Accenture will work with TradeIX to bring to market new use cases, beyond banking, to address the needs of buyers and sellers within trade finance. TradeIX is the latest addition to the investment portfolio of Accenture Ventures, which teams with and invests in companies that create or apply innovative enterprise technologies.

Robert Barnes, CEO and co-founder of TradeIX, said, “With our global footprint expanding exponentially across both banks and their corporate clients, this alliance with Accenture is instrumental in us achieving our ambitions in making trade more transparent, smarter and better connected internationally.”

The companies will work together to develop touchless finance processes, such as procure-to-pay and order-to-cash. This initiative will further expand the Marco Polo Network—a joint undertaking of over 30 leading banks, corporations and technology providers enabling simple, secured sharing of trade-related data between financial institutions and their corporate clients — to include buyers, suppliers, logistics and other entities. Accenture will also serve as a preferred implementation partner for the Marco Polo Platform.

The World Economic Forum estimates that applying blockchain, the most common type of distributed ledger technology, could result in more than US$1 trillion of new trade in the next decade.