Gen10 Delivers First trade finance repo deal done on blockchain in the metals industry
Over the last couple of years, Gen10 has more or less completely reinvented itself. This was confirmed in the last call that I had with CEO Richard Williamson. Founded in 2000, Gen10 has delivered many projects across the commodities space. These days, Gen10 is focused on collaborative commodity management technology and it has built out a fairly complete approach to delivering on this vision, perhaps building on the insights and expertise gained over the last 19-years working across the space. “The commodity and raw materials trade and its service providers need to drive down costs, create value from data and innovate. They are struggling with digital transformation. Tighter margins and democratized market data are forcing companies to transform their internal processes and to seek collaborative industry solutions with online platform and blockchain initiatives,” Richard told me.
In a recent briefing call, Richard alerted us about Gen10’s role in the consortium founded by Rabobank, Aon, Concord Resources, Pacorini Global Services and Gen10. Gen10 is the technology and project lead that is creating an ecosystem of focused, fast-to-market, dApps that deliver efficiencies, control and innovation without requiring majority industry adoption. “Gen10’s technology, processes and experience are the key to the consortium’s ability to deliver more value, faster and at lower cost than the competition. This is being leveraged by the consortium to build the network,” Richard said. He also told me that in just 2-months of elapsed time, Gen10 and the consortium had gone from concept to conducting what was thought to be the first trade finance repo deal done on blockchain in the metals industry. “We were able to do this because of our platform CommOS, which has productized the core building blocks of an enterprise solution for companies in the commodities supply chain.”
CommOS, a mixture of open source and G10 developed components, uses “a decoupled architecture of database, business logic and front-end user experience technologies in order to adapt effectively to the increasing pace of innovation, safeguarding against rebuilds or obsolescence. “ CommOS provides the means to use Gen10’s APIs and web services and enables inter-operability with other systems and services. In this instance, it allowed Gen10 to develop using a rapid application development approach, Repo:NOW for the consortium, which helps reduce the paperwork and improves controls in repurchase agreements from 5 days to 5 minutes very rapidly.
ComTech is forced to note in this regard the massive hype surrounding multiple announcements around blockchain in the industry by some heavyweight entities with apparently little or no progress. Meanwhile, a small and relatively obscure Commodity-focused software developer, Gen10, is delivering in 2 months. That’s quite an achievement we reckon and are forced to conclude that there is something to Gen10’s API, dApp and App ecosystem approach centered on CommOS.
