Seven Japanese enterprises today announced that they have agreed to jointly invest in TradeWaltz Inc. (TradeWaltz), the company that manages the trade data sharing platform that operated by the same name.

The list of companies taking part in the investment includes NTT DATA Corporation, Mitsubishi Corporation, Toyota Tsusho Corporation, Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd., MUFG Bank, Ltd., Kanematsu Corporation, and Sompo Japan Insurance Inc.

Trading operations cover a wide range of products and involve numerous procedures, including documentation, consistency confirmations, and other work that can be costly to perform manually. Furthermore, considering multiple parties engaged in a single transaction, developing a system accurately and safely to share information has been a challenge faced by all industries.

A cross-industrial consortium was established in August 2017 to address this challenge. With NTT DATA acting as its secretariat, the consortium worked with various trading companies, banks, insurance companies, shipping companies, and other industry players to examine how digitalize technologies might be used to make trading operations safer and more efficient. After tax reforms prompted a revision of Japan’s law on the preservation of electronic tax records and other changes in 2020, the Japanese government also began to actively encourage businesses to make the switch from paper to digital.

Based on the results of its discussions among consortium members, NTT DATA began developing the TradeWaltz® platform, which uses blockchain technology to connect trade-related information. Provided that this proves to be a practical system, it should make it possible to digitalize and centrally manage all trading operations, cutting workloads by as much as 50%.

Administration, development, and management of the platform is handled by TradeWaltz, which was founded in April of this year. The seven aforementioned enterprises that recently agreed to invest in TradeWaltz will be working closely with one another to further develop the platform into a practical and commercially viable business.

The first step will be a sequential rollout, whereby it is adopted gradually for different processes with new functions added and other improvements made where necessary. In the future, the TradeWaltz platform can connect government agencies, service providers, and other players both in Japan and abroad who are considering digitalization of documents.

All seven investors are confident that its successful rollout can help to promote the digitalization of trading operations, first in the ASEAN region and eventually throughout the world.